Not sure how I feel on this one. The idea that it won’t cost authors any sales seems ludicrous, but being able to do a search and find passages from any number of books sounds VERY useful. What I really want to know is: Where was this tool when I was in high school?
Google (s goog) cites everything from Mad Men to minority rights in a fresh attempt to bolster its claim that the scanning of millions of books qualifies as a “fair use” under copyright law. The arguments, set out in court filings submitted on Friday, come as Google’s long-running dispute with the Authors Guild heads toward an end game.
According to Google, its massive book scanning project is fair use because the scanning has delivered many public benefits without harming authors. The company claims that its creation of full-text book searching is “the most significant advance in library search technology in the last five decades” and that the Authors Guild has shown “no evidence that Google Books has displaced the sale of even a single book.”
The new filing (embedded below) is in response to Judge Denny Chin’s deadline for Google and the Authors Guild to submit arguments on why the case can be…
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