Google Books Is Good for Everybody

A recent court ruling on copyright law is a rare example of legal and poetic justice.

By Mike Godwin - Slate

The Rose Main Reading Room of New York Public Library, one of more than 40 partner libraries to the Google Books project.

Photo by Marcio Jose Bastos Silva/Shutterstock

In 1990, Pierre N. Leval, then serving as a federal judge, ran across an unexpected stumbling block while crafting a Harvard Law Review article about the “fair use” doctrine of American copyright law. To wit, he was worried that quoting his own cases, exactly as they had been published in law volumes, might itself run afoul of then-narrowing fair use guidelines, which govern how much of someone else’s copyrighted work you can lawfully quote without asking permission.

Last week, Leval—now serving as a senior judge on the 2^nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals—finally got his best shot yet at restoring balance to “fair use” law, in an expansive Court of Appeals decision that reaffirmed the lawfulness of Google Books, a project that involved the unlicensed scanning and online search of whole libraries. A similar decision against the plaintiffs in another case, this one involving a non-for-profit research database, had come down last year. But last week’s 3–0 Google Books decision broke ground by straightforwardly favoring the book-scanning project’s wholly commercial parent company (still known as “Google,” but now a division of Alphabet Inc.).
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