I’ll take a short break from solving global warming and go back to the Author’s Guild case against Google. The appellate decision has been published, and it affirms Google’s “fair use” right to use plaintiffs’ books in their “Google Books” project. I disagree with that decision. For one, the Appellate Court relies on the fact that Google shows only small parts of the books in question to searchers. As mentioned ten years ago here and here, the problem with that approach is that it only looks at the individual use of one individual searcher. That would be relevant if the plaintiffs were suing some individual searcher. They are not. They are suing Google. Therefore, the analysis of the “amount of use” must look at what part of the works Google uses when serving the snippets to all searchers. That is almost all of the work. And of course, as the Court notes elsewhere, Google makes copies of the whole work. They actually…
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