10 ms·

Fair use prevails as Supreme Court rejects Google Books copyright case

239 points by coloneltcb 11y ago

Gargoyle 11y ago
Is it fair use when Google uses an entire scanned work in a machine learning project that leads to commercial gain? That to me is a far trickier question...
- forgotpwtomain 11y ago
  If I understand correctly from the article their current use is not resulting in financial gain. >> Unlike other forms of Google search, Google does not display advertising to book searchers, nor does it receive payment if a searcher uses Google's link to buy a copy. Google's book scanning project started in 2004. If that changes later on that may be cause enough to for them to be challenged on fair-use again.
- msravi 11y ago
  If I read an entire book and I use the knowledge acquired from reading the book for commercial gain, is it fair use?
- foota 11y ago
  I think the use would be considered transformative enough so as to outweigh the commercial use. Based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#1._Purpose_and_character_of_the_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#1._Purpose_and_charac...
- ddispaltro 11y ago
  Yeah I think that is a tough one, but I do think what they are trying to do is not a bad thing, especially since they are specifically skipping advertising. Bottom line, if books were more searchable I think it makes the world a better and more accessible place.
- xamuel 11y ago
  "Is it fair use when (company) uses an entire scanned work in a machine learning project that leads to greater overall technology and a better world?"
- greglindahl 11y ago
  You might want to familiarize yourself with the 4 factor test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors Many "fair use" usages lead to commercial gain.
  - Gargoyle 11y ago
    Sure, but that's not the only factor in my thought experiment. For example, "The third factor assesses the amount and substantiality of the copyrighted work that has been used. In general, the less that is used in relation to the whole, the more likely the use will be considered fair." Using a work in its entirety surely must factor in.
    - greglindahl 11y ago
      You might want to read this next: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2606731 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2606731 TL;DR: "usage" by computer algorithm is quite different from showing a copyrighted work to a human.
      - Gargoyle 11y ago
        Thanks for the link to the paper, I'll comment on what I find to be relevant in it in case it is of use to others. There is a part re Sega v Accolade that brings up the interesting sub-topic of "intermediate copying", which is legal, but then says it's legal because it's “the only way to gain access to the ideas and functional elements embodied in a copyrighted computer program.” But wholesale scanning of entire works is not the only way to gain access to the ideas of books. It's also possible to purchase copies from the publishers. Perhaps a bit more relevant- "Accolade was not using Sega’s games for their protected expressive content, but simply to extract some unprotected, functional, nonexpressive information contained within them" I think that would be debatable in certain machine learning projects. Perhaps much of it would fall under that category, but a large part of the point would in fact be to extract the expressive information contained in them. What I'm trying to get at is related- Google (and other machine learning giants) is making an effort to extract the expressive content of these works. That's different from what we've seen in the past. To me, at least, it feel like it's worth asking if it's right that the people who produced that expressive content should not be compensated for it.
- runholm 11y ago
  If you read a book and publish a review for commercial purposes, you have as a human scanned the whole book for commercial gain. I fail to see the difference.
- Flimm 11y ago
  Google already keeps copies of copyrighted web pages for its Internet search engine. This is the same thing, but for books, isn't it?
- xbmcuser 11y ago
  You might have learned how to code from books you borrowed so now the author and publisher should be paid part of your earnings?
greglindahl 11y ago
This is a pretty awesome finish to this series of court cases. Here's one example of a tool positively affected by this court case: https://blog.archive.org/2016/02/09/how-will-we-explore-books-in-the-21st-century/ https://blog.archive.org/2016/02/09/how-will-we-explore-book...
gabemart 11y ago
Does anyone know why the Author's Guild has pursued this case? Do they have a good-faith belief that they are losing potential revenue from a "licensed search" market? Or is it simply a precedent case for them? Edit: https://www.authorsguild.org/where-we-stand/authors-guild-v-google/ https://www.authorsguild.org/where-we-stand/authors-guild-v-... is somewhat helpful in understanding the Author's Guild's position, particularly that they reached a settlement with Google in 2008 that was later rejected by the court
- Natanael_L 11y ago
  Like I said elsewhere, it feels like intellectual territorialism (partially wordplay on "intellectual property rights"). They feel threatened by just about any use of anything under their umbrella that they have not yet explicit approved. They want to be gatekeepers not just for the products, but for what you get to do with them. They want to control the market including both discoverability and which business models that may be used. You can see the same behavior most prominently in the movie industry and in how they treat video services and apply their "release windows", including the enforced DRM. Look up bluray licensing too, and how they handle even the patent licensing both for players and disc distributors.
jsjohnst 11y ago
I very likely am biased as my primary income doesn't come from my written literary works, but as a published author, I simply don't get the PoV of the publishing/music/movie industry. Just because you published something doesn't mean you should be paid for every single possible usage of it for the rest of your life. I know this isn't an Apples to Apples comparison, but imagine where tech would be today if you were paid a royalty every time something you produced was used in any form. Every time that header bar you wrote for Google back in 2006 is reused, adapted, extended, whatever, you got a >1% royalty on. It's simply not sustainable and I feel is why these "content" industries will ultimately fail. I'm pretty vocally negative about many things Google does, but as a long as the continue their current course with this platform, I simply can't support the author's guild's "sky falling" hyperbole.
- bad_user 11y ago
  The "sky falling" hyperbole would be believable with shorter copyright terms, but with life plus 70/90/120 years, enforced by DRM technologies meant to lock us into specific proprietary platforms, ripping us of any sense of ownership for the things we buy, the whole industry can go fuck themselves.
  - venomsnake 11y ago
    Don't forget about gaming history that could be/is lost. We have emulators up to PS2 and almost everything on PC without always online is cracked. But with current decisions that game companies own your play-trough (they were able to shutdown streams on copyright grounds - it is as if the person that supplies the paints has copyright of the painting) - and with emulator servers moving more and more into the illegal - we could enter a digital history dark age. A lot of the cultural phenomenon that was WoW is lost and unexperiancable for the future generations.
    - mattlutze 11y ago
      > it is as if the person that supplies the paints has copyright of the painting This is a great characterization of the problem, though it's not entirely clear where the issue lies. A production company gets together a ton of money to build a film or game. Because of that they own the profits on most of the produced work. What's really tough to understand is that they can choose to stop making profit from it, and in so doing, stop others from using it altogether. All of these cloud-centric services suffer the same fate -- as soon as the remote part of the product disappears, the entire thing becomes unusable. If that WoW license, for example, didn't come with a "right" to run the game against an independent server, does the production company have to leave itself open to lawsuits, for example, originating through players of the game and weird things happening on even a "vanilla" independent server? I just don't think "I paid $40 so it's mine" can cut it any more when we're really not buying many of the core or important bits of the game itself.
reacweb 11y ago
Google wants to feed their AI with all the humanity knowledge. Providing a service to users is just a byproduct of their quest for the singularity ;-)
- Gargoyle 11y ago
  OK, sure. But shouldn't Google compensate their sources???
  - AnthonyMouse 11y ago
    Presumably somebody actually bought a copy of each scanned book. Aren't we just getting back to the same deal as the people who wanted Google to pay them to link to them? They were all screaming about how Google was making money on their backs. Even passed a law about it in a couple of countries. Then Google says OK, we're not going to pay you, we'll just stop linking to you. Suddenly everybody in one of those countries strikes a "deal" with Google where Google goes back to linking to them in exchange for no money whatsoever. The main difference with printed books is that so many of them are orphan works that nobody even knows who the copyright holder is, so the default being the opposite of what everybody actually wants means that all of those works actually disappear out of the index. Which is why I suspect the publishers want it that way. Then they can opt-in to being indexed but without all the competition from orphan works, works with uncertain copyright status, works by smaller entities that don't know how to opt-in, etc. Either that or it's like the news sites and they just don't realize how stupid the thing they're asking for actually is.
    - Gargoyle 11y ago
      Well, no. Google did not in fact purchase a copy of the book they're making money on. So you do think Google should make billions from the minds of others without compensation. Before you accuse me of hyberbole, you used the term "screaming".
      - AnthonyMouse 11y ago
jessriedel 11y ago
It's unfortunate that the ArsTechnica coverage is heavily slanted toward Google, and SCOTUSblog's against, to the point where it's hard to recognize the two articles as describing the same case. Neither makes a good-faith effort to square the two viewpoints. SCOTUSblog coverage: > The challengers, in their appeal, argued that the lower court decisions awarding Google a summary victory deviated sharply from the traditional view that one who copies a protected creative work can only claim the legal defense of “fair use” if the copying satisfies the four factors that Congress spelled out in federal law. > What happened in this case, the challengers argued, was that lower courts permitted Google to rely upon its claim of “fair use” by inventing a new legal concept — that is, so long as the one who makes copies “transforms” the work into another, culturally useful mode, then it is legal. That, the guild and the authors asserted, “empowers judges to approve any re-use of copyrighted works that those judges deem socially beneficial.” http://www.scotusblog.com/2016/04/googles-book-copying-project-survives-challenge/#more-241616 http://www.scotusblog.com/2016/04/googles-book-copying-proje... The Fair Use factors: > 1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; > 2. the nature of the copyrighted work; > 3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and > 4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors From the Author's guild: >Google argued, and still argues, that its book-search program (now called Google Books) offers great public benefits and therefore the copying should be protected under the legal doctrine of “fair use.” We do not believe that private companies should be able to make full digital copies of copyrighted books en masse for commercial purposes under the fair use doctrine—that is, without compensating the rightsholders. So the authors, publishers, and Google sat down to reach a compromise. A proper solution, we believed, would allow readers to benefit while also making sure that authors and publishers got paid for Google’s use of their work. > After 30 months of talks, we reached an agreement in October 2008: Google would pay out $125 million. Some would go to the owners of the books that were scanned without permission; the rest would fund the Book Rights Registry, an organization that would track down and distribute fees to authors. Google would be able to display out-of-print books to users and charge licensing fees for copyrighted works. Also, the settlement required Google to provide portals in every public library and more than 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S., allowing widespread access. https://www.authorsguild.org/where-we-stand/authors-guild-v-google/ https://www.authorsguild.org/where-we-stand/authors-guild-v-...
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
Yes, Google are only showing users small snippets. That's probably fair use. But what arguably might not be is Google scanning entire books en masse in order to get to the point where they can do that.
- xbmcuser 11y ago
  Well it was argued and the courts decided with Google. So it is no longer arguable.
teddyh 11y ago
> In the long run, the ruling could inspire other large-scale digitization projects. This is, for me, the important bit. Previously, Google was alone in having done this, and had an effective monopoly on all the information in the whole world's books. This was (and still is) not a good situation for the rest of us to be in. Now, I would hope for Wikimedia and/or the Internet Archive to ramp up similar book scanning projects.
- lucozade 11y ago
  Which is interesting as this is precisely what the Guild were hoping to prevent using a slippery slope argument i.e. Google might not be taking money from them but others scanning the whole work could. Equally, the original agreement between the Guild and Google would have amounted to an effective monopoly but the Guild were fine with that as their authors were getting paid. In this case, it seems that the courts walked a line between the 2 vested interests and produced an outcome that may well lead to a greater good in the long term.
- greglindahl 11y ago
  The Internet Archive has scanned 2.2 million books, and we hope to scan 700,000 more by the end of this year. That data is what is behind https://blog.archive.org/2016/02/09/how-will-we-explore-books-in-the-21st-century/ https://blog.archive.org/2016/02/09/how-will-we-explore-book...
chris_wot 11y ago
Fair use is not as straight forward as many people think it is. I remember having to grapple with it when I was an admin on Wikipedia as the only known, decent quality photo of J. D. Salinger was nominated for deletion. I chose to keep after examining the arguments and applying my knowledge of U.S. Fair Use doctrine. Fair Use is codified in 17 U.S. Code § 107 - Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use [1] - basically there are four things that must be taken into consideration; purpose of work, what it is being used for (e.g. educational use, criticism that involves reproducing part of the work), the amount that is used and whether it would impact upon the market or value of the work. If anyone is interested, my reasoning for the J. D. Salinger decision can be found in the Wikipedia archives [2]. 1. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Files_for_deletion/2010_January_28#File:JD_Salinger.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Files_for_deletion/2...

239 points by coloneltcb 11y ago

Is it fair use when Google uses an entire scanned work in a machine learning project that leads to commercial gain? That to me is a far trickier question...

forgotpwtomain 11y ago
If I understand correctly from the article their current use is not resulting in financial gain. >> Unlike other forms of Google search, Google does not display advertising to book searchers, nor does it receive payment if a searcher uses Google's link to buy a copy. Google's book scanning project started in 2004. If that changes later on that may be cause enough to for them to be challenged on fair-use again.
msravi 11y ago
If I read an entire book and I use the knowledge acquired from reading the book for commercial gain, is it fair use?
foota 11y ago
I think the use would be considered transformative enough so as to outweigh the commercial use. Based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#1._Purpose_and_character_of_the_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#1._Purpose_and_charac...
ddispaltro 11y ago
Yeah I think that is a tough one, but I do think what they are trying to do is not a bad thing, especially since they are specifically skipping advertising. Bottom line, if books were more searchable I think it makes the world a better and more accessible place.
xamuel 11y ago
"Is it fair use when (company) uses an entire scanned work in a machine learning project that leads to greater overall technology and a better world?"
greglindahl 11y ago
You might want to familiarize yourself with the 4 factor test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors Many "fair use" usages lead to commercial gain.
- Gargoyle 11y ago
  Sure, but that's not the only factor in my thought experiment. For example, "The third factor assesses the amount and substantiality of the copyrighted work that has been used. In general, the less that is used in relation to the whole, the more likely the use will be considered fair." Using a work in its entirety surely must factor in.
  - greglindahl 11y ago
    You might want to read this next: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2606731 http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2606731 TL;DR: "usage" by computer algorithm is quite different from showing a copyrighted work to a human.
    - Gargoyle 11y ago
      Thanks for the link to the paper, I'll comment on what I find to be relevant in it in case it is of use to others. There is a part re Sega v Accolade that brings up the interesting sub-topic of "intermediate copying", which is legal, but then says it's legal because it's “the only way to gain access to the ideas and functional elements embodied in a copyrighted computer program.” But wholesale scanning of entire works is not the only way to gain access to the ideas of books. It's also possible to purchase copies from the publishers. Perhaps a bit more relevant- "Accolade was not using Sega’s games for their protected expressive content, but simply to extract some unprotected, functional, nonexpressive information contained within them" I think that would be debatable in certain machine learning projects. Perhaps much of it would fall under that category, but a large part of the point would in fact be to extract the expressive information contained in them. What I'm trying to get at is related- Google (and other machine learning giants) is making an effort to extract the expressive content of these works. That's different from what we've seen in the past. To me, at least, it feel like it's worth asking if it's right that the people who produced that expressive content should not be compensated for it.
runholm 11y ago
If you read a book and publish a review for commercial purposes, you have as a human scanned the whole book for commercial gain. I fail to see the difference.
Flimm 11y ago
Google already keeps copies of copyrighted web pages for its Internet search engine. This is the same thing, but for books, isn't it?
xbmcuser 11y ago
You might have learned how to code from books you borrowed so now the author and publisher should be paid part of your earnings?

greglindahl 11y ago

This is a pretty awesome finish to this series of court cases. Here's one example of a tool positively affected by this court case: https://blog.archive.org/2016/02/09/how-will-we-explore-books-in-the-21st-century/ https://blog.archive.org/2016/02/09/how-will-we-explore-book...

gabemart 11y ago

Does anyone know why the Author's Guild has pursued this case? Do they have a good-faith belief that they are losing potential revenue from a "licensed search" market? Or is it simply a precedent case for them? Edit: https://www.authorsguild.org/where-we-stand/authors-guild-v-google/ https://www.authorsguild.org/where-we-stand/authors-guild-v-... is somewhat helpful in understanding the Author's Guild's position, particularly that they reached a settlement with Google in 2008 that was later rejected by the court

Natanael_L 11y ago
Like I said elsewhere, it feels like intellectual territorialism (partially wordplay on "intellectual property rights"). They feel threatened by just about any use of anything under their umbrella that they have not yet explicit approved. They want to be gatekeepers not just for the products, but for what you get to do with them. They want to control the market including both discoverability and which business models that may be used. You can see the same behavior most prominently in the movie industry and in how they treat video services and apply their "release windows", including the enforced DRM. Look up bluray licensing too, and how they handle even the patent licensing both for players and disc distributors.

jsjohnst 11y ago

I very likely am biased as my primary income doesn't come from my written literary works, but as a published author, I simply don't get the PoV of the publishing/music/movie industry. Just because you published something doesn't mean you should be paid for every single possible usage of it for the rest of your life. I know this isn't an Apples to Apples comparison, but imagine where tech would be today if you were paid a royalty every time something you produced was used in any form. Every time that header bar you wrote for Google back in 2006 is reused, adapted, extended, whatever, you got a >1% royalty on. It's simply not sustainable and I feel is why these "content" industries will ultimately fail. I'm pretty vocally negative about many things Google does, but as a long as the continue their current course with this platform, I simply can't support the author's guild's "sky falling" hyperbole.

bad_user 11y ago
The "sky falling" hyperbole would be believable with shorter copyright terms, but with life plus 70/90/120 years, enforced by DRM technologies meant to lock us into specific proprietary platforms, ripping us of any sense of ownership for the things we buy, the whole industry can go fuck themselves.
- venomsnake 11y ago
  Don't forget about gaming history that could be/is lost. We have emulators up to PS2 and almost everything on PC without always online is cracked. But with current decisions that game companies own your play-trough (they were able to shutdown streams on copyright grounds - it is as if the person that supplies the paints has copyright of the painting) - and with emulator servers moving more and more into the illegal - we could enter a digital history dark age. A lot of the cultural phenomenon that was WoW is lost and unexperiancable for the future generations.
  - mattlutze 11y ago
    > it is as if the person that supplies the paints has copyright of the painting This is a great characterization of the problem, though it's not entirely clear where the issue lies. A production company gets together a ton of money to build a film or game. Because of that they own the profits on most of the produced work. What's really tough to understand is that they can choose to stop making profit from it, and in so doing, stop others from using it altogether. All of these cloud-centric services suffer the same fate -- as soon as the remote part of the product disappears, the entire thing becomes unusable. If that WoW license, for example, didn't come with a "right" to run the game against an independent server, does the production company have to leave itself open to lawsuits, for example, originating through players of the game and weird things happening on even a "vanilla" independent server? I just don't think "I paid $40 so it's mine" can cut it any more when we're really not buying many of the core or important bits of the game itself.

reacweb 11y ago

Google wants to feed their AI with all the humanity knowledge. Providing a service to users is just a byproduct of their quest for the singularity ;-)

Gargoyle 11y ago
OK, sure. But shouldn't Google compensate their sources???
- AnthonyMouse 11y ago
  Presumably somebody actually bought a copy of each scanned book. Aren't we just getting back to the same deal as the people who wanted Google to pay them to link to them? They were all screaming about how Google was making money on their backs. Even passed a law about it in a couple of countries. Then Google says OK, we're not going to pay you, we'll just stop linking to you. Suddenly everybody in one of those countries strikes a "deal" with Google where Google goes back to linking to them in exchange for no money whatsoever. The main difference with printed books is that so many of them are orphan works that nobody even knows who the copyright holder is, so the default being the opposite of what everybody actually wants means that all of those works actually disappear out of the index. Which is why I suspect the publishers want it that way. Then they can opt-in to being indexed but without all the competition from orphan works, works with uncertain copyright status, works by smaller entities that don't know how to opt-in, etc. Either that or it's like the news sites and they just don't realize how stupid the thing they're asking for actually is.
  - Gargoyle 11y ago
    Well, no. Google did not in fact purchase a copy of the book they're making money on. So you do think Google should make billions from the minds of others without compensation. Before you accuse me of hyberbole, you used the term "screaming".
    - AnthonyMouse 11y ago

jessriedel 11y ago

It's unfortunate that the ArsTechnica coverage is heavily slanted toward Google, and SCOTUSblog's against, to the point where it's hard to recognize the two articles as describing the same case. Neither makes a good-faith effort to square the two viewpoints. SCOTUSblog coverage: > The challengers, in their appeal, argued that the lower court decisions awarding Google a summary victory deviated sharply from the traditional view that one who copies a protected creative work can only claim the legal defense of “fair use” if the copying satisfies the four factors that Congress spelled out in federal law. > What happened in this case, the challengers argued, was that lower courts permitted Google to rely upon its claim of “fair use” by inventing a new legal concept — that is, so long as the one who makes copies “transforms” the work into another, culturally useful mode, then it is legal. That, the guild and the authors asserted, “empowers judges to approve any re-use of copyrighted works that those judges deem socially beneficial.” http://www.scotusblog.com/2016/04/googles-book-copying-project-survives-challenge/#more-241616 http://www.scotusblog.com/2016/04/googles-book-copying-proje... The Fair Use factors: > 1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; > 2. the nature of the copyrighted work; > 3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and > 4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors From the Author's guild: >Google argued, and still argues, that its book-search program (now called Google Books) offers great public benefits and therefore the copying should be protected under the legal doctrine of “fair use.” We do not believe that private companies should be able to make full digital copies of copyrighted books en masse for commercial purposes under the fair use doctrine—that is, without compensating the rightsholders. So the authors, publishers, and Google sat down to reach a compromise. A proper solution, we believed, would allow readers to benefit while also making sure that authors and publishers got paid for Google’s use of their work. > After 30 months of talks, we reached an agreement in October 2008: Google would pay out $125 million. Some would go to the owners of the books that were scanned without permission; the rest would fund the Book Rights Registry, an organization that would track down and distribute fees to authors. Google would be able to display out-of-print books to users and charge licensing fees for copyrighted works. Also, the settlement required Google to provide portals in every public library and more than 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S., allowing widespread access. https://www.authorsguild.org/where-we-stand/authors-guild-v-google/ https://www.authorsguild.org/where-we-stand/authors-guild-v-...

TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago

Yes, Google are only showing users small snippets. That's probably fair use. But what arguably might not be is Google scanning entire books en masse in order to get to the point where they can do that.

xbmcuser 11y ago
Well it was argued and the courts decided with Google. So it is no longer arguable.

teddyh 11y ago

> In the long run, the ruling could inspire other large-scale digitization projects. This is, for me, the important bit. Previously, Google was alone in having done this, and had an effective monopoly on all the information in the whole world's books. This was (and still is) not a good situation for the rest of us to be in. Now, I would hope for Wikimedia and/or the Internet Archive to ramp up similar book scanning projects.

lucozade 11y ago
Which is interesting as this is precisely what the Guild were hoping to prevent using a slippery slope argument i.e. Google might not be taking money from them but others scanning the whole work could. Equally, the original agreement between the Guild and Google would have amounted to an effective monopoly but the Guild were fine with that as their authors were getting paid. In this case, it seems that the courts walked a line between the 2 vested interests and produced an outcome that may well lead to a greater good in the long term.
greglindahl 11y ago
The Internet Archive has scanned 2.2 million books, and we hope to scan 700,000 more by the end of this year. That data is what is behind https://blog.archive.org/2016/02/09/how-will-we-explore-books-in-the-21st-century/ https://blog.archive.org/2016/02/09/how-will-we-explore-book...

chris_wot 11y ago

Fair use is not as straight forward as many people think it is. I remember having to grapple with it when I was an admin on Wikipedia as the only known, decent quality photo of J. D. Salinger was nominated for deletion. I chose to keep after examining the arguments and applying my knowledge of U.S. Fair Use doctrine. Fair Use is codified in 17 U.S. Code § 107 - Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use [1] - basically there are four things that must be taken into consideration; purpose of work, what it is being used for (e.g. educational use, criticism that involves reproducing part of the work), the amount that is used and whether it would impact upon the market or value of the work. If anyone is interested, my reasoning for the J. D. Salinger decision can be found in the Wikipedia archives [2]. 1. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Files_for_deletion/2010_January_28#File:JD_Salinger.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Files_for_deletion/2...