The Authors Guild’s decade long lawsuit against Google came to an end April 18th when the Supreme Court declined to hear the Authors Guild’s Appeal of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals decision from October 2015. By declining, the Supreme Court affirmed the Circuit Court’s ruling that Google’s digitization of library collections, the creation of search functionality, and display of snippets are all non-infringing fair uses. If one takes into account the fair use findings in other similar cases, there are now four argued rulings which affirm that the work undertaken by participants in the Google Library Project to convert library collections to digital form constitute fair use as defined by U.S. Copyright law, a victory for fair use, libraries, scholars, researchers, and the public alike.
The University of California has been in partnership with the Google Library Project since 2006. As result, close to 3.8 million volumes from UC Library collections have been converted to digital form and are in HathiTrust and Google Books. These digitized volumes (the majority of which are long out of print), can be discovered, searched, and located by anyone using traditional metadata or search terms. Half a million of these volumes are in the public domain and are open access, which means the full text is available for reading.
