Many authors believe that Google's massive book library complicates the marketing of their work ... but the Supreme Court wasn't having it.
Earlier Monday, the Supreme Court rejected a lawsuit from authors pointing their fingers at Google, as they accused the tech company's millions of books of "copyright infringement on an epic scale," as reported by the Associated Press.
However, that wasn't the way the Supreme Court saw it at all, and it ruled in favor of Google, saying that the technology force giving the public small portions of titles isn't a violation of copyright infringement laws.
As reported by the AP, the appeals court said that the company's "snippet view, at best and after a large commitment of manpower, produces discontinuous, tiny fragments, amounting in the aggregate to no more than 16 percent of a book. This does not threaten the rights holders with any significant harm to the value of their copyrights or diminish their harvest of copyright revenue."
Monday's result comes after the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York also found that Google was not guilty of violating copyright infringement laws by showing the public snippets of books. In fact, the Authors Guild and authors even not a part of it have taken issue with Google's way of digitizing book portions dating back to over a decade, beginning in 2005.
Despite the backlash from those select authors, Google didn't stop building up its online library to include over 20 million book titles, equipping the public with a search function that works in the same way as its regular vaunted Google search — a feature, when combined with the snippet view, that authors claim is helping to cripple their book sales.
According to the AP, some of the authors involved in the lawsuit included Jim Bouton of the bestseller Ball Four and Betty Miles (The Trouble with Thirteen).
If you think about it, the same argument that these authors are saying hurt their book sales may actually be helping them. If customers read a Google snippet and that 16 percent is so enthralling that it makes them purchase the title, then it should be considered as a win-win for both the author and Google.
However, something tells us that this won't be the end of this back-and-forth between authors and the tech company.
