Must-read: Cory Doctorow: “Supreme Court sends Authors Guild packing, won’t hear Google Books case”

Must-Read: A defeat for the rent-seekers!

Cory Doctorow: Supreme Court sends Authors Guild packing, won’t hear Google Books case: “The Authors Guild has been trying to get a court to shut down…

…Google’s book-scanning/book-search program for more than a decade. Last October, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals — the most publisher-friendly court in America — ruled that the program was legal. Today, the Supreme Court settled the question forever, by declining to hear the Authors Guild’s appeal. I’ve written a lot about this, but here’s the tl;dr: if making a copy in order to create a search index violates copyright, then all search engines are illegal….

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. Working with major libraries like Stanford, Columbia, the University of California, and the New York Public Library, Google has scanned and made machine-readable more than 20 million books. Many of them are nonfiction and out of print.