Latest chapter on Google Books: Court says it's legal under fair use

The lawsuit was filed by the Authors Guild in 2005, a year after announced it was working with major libraries on a significant scanning project.

Friday, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York unanimously agreed with Google. Under its plan it won't make copies of the books available, but only provide a short excerpt and a link to where people can buy the book, or borrow it from a library.

The appeals court ruled that is fair use despite the company's commercial motivation.

The appeals court Google's profit motivation does not justify denial of what is a fair use of the books' content and overall enhances public knowledge. Judge Denny Chin ruled in November 2013 that Google Books provides a public benefit and doesn't harm authors.

The appeals panel said it recognized that libraries that had negotiated with Google to receive digital copies from the company might use them in an infringing manner. Numerous books are nonfiction and most are out of print. When you search for something in Google Books, it tells which of those books have the phrase in it and how many times it appears.

"Google's division of the page into tiny snippets is created to show the searcher just enough context surrounding the searched term to help her evaluate whether the book falls within the scope of her interest (without revealing so much as to threaten the author's copyright interests)", Leval wrote.

The use of book text to facilitate search through the display of snippets is transformative...to a broad selection of books. The court's decision gives institutions - public or private, large or small - a template for how they can scan and share books, according to Brandon Butler, a practitioner-in-residence at American University's Washington College of Law.

Authors argued that the project violated their copyrights, even when Google offered the search and viewing entry with out cost, as a result of it supported Google's dominance of the promoting-pushed Internet search enterprise. The court said that it constituted fair use.

The ruling is part of a now decade-long and bitter battle between authors and publishers on one hand and researchers and Google on the other.

In case you've never used Google Books before, it's a searchable database of millions of books that Google has digitized through agreements with libraries.