COPYRIGHT ON THE WEB
The US Supreme Court has declared inadmissible the appeal of America’s Authors Guild against Google Books, thus confirming that the database does not violate the rights of the authors of the works it reproduces.

Google Books does not violate US copyright law; on Monday the US Supreme Court put a nail in the coffin of the action brought by the Authors Guild, America’s largest association of professional writers, against Google Books, a freely accessible database launched by Google at the end of 2004 that contains excerpts from millions of books, many of them covered by copyrights.

Technically, on Monday the Supreme Court merely declared inadmissible the further appeal against the appeal decision of 2015 which had in turn confirmed the first instance decision issued by a New York district court in 2013.

The district court had held that Google Books did not violate copyright law because it had made available to the public only excerpts of the works, had not offered the books for sale and had in effect created a new service: a search engine for books that in many cases are out of print and therefore unavailable. Google Books, according to the district court, had given the public access to a limited selection of the books’ contents, in a way that did not affect the rights of the authors.

20 April 2016