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Supreme Court rejects Google Books copyright case

Written by James Delahunty @ 19 Apr 2016 2:52 User comments (4)

Supreme Court rejects Google Books copyright case

The Authors Guild copyright law case against Google Books will not be examined by the U.S. Supreme Court.
A group of authors filed a lawsuit against Google over a decade ago in response to its planned service. Google Books makes it easy for consumers to search through the contents of millions of books that have been scanned by Google over the years, and display excerpts from books that match the queries.

In 2013, a court dismissed the authors' case against Google and the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also found no fault with Google's practices in this regard.

Google argues that the service does not allow users to read any substantial portion of a book, but instead only returns excerpts from books and even lets them know where they can buy a copy. This, according to Google, makes it simpler for readers to rediscover works or to discover entirely new books they have never read.

To date, Google has scanned more than 20 million books, according to the Reuters news agency.

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4 user comments

119.4.2016 10:13

That's a stupid lawsuit. It helped me buy a couple books.

220.4.2016 16:57

Originally posted by NHS2008:
That's a stupid lawsuit. It helped me buy a couple books.
Nice!

I was gonna say that this is a terrible lawsuit as this indeed does bring awareness to previous works as well as current ones.

322.4.2016 00:28

I wonder who the authors are. I can't imagine their books are very good if they have to resort to petty crap like this.

425.4.2016 09:33

Originally posted by CarpeSol:
I wonder who the authors are. I can't imagine their books are very good if they have to resort to petty crap like this.
Probably people who have had one good line in their entire career and are thus afraid that people will get free access to the only good thing they ever did.

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