> > The challengers, in their appeal, argued that the lower court decisions awarding Google a summary victory deviated sharply from the traditional view that on

> > 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. It's weird that SCOTUSblog parrots that line from the Author's Guild so credulously. It's never been true that all four factors must be satisfied to some imagined threshold, and in fact that four factors are qualitative by design. > 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. By that argument, no web search engine could practically exist either.