Google wins 11-year copyright battle

The long pending case was finally over with the US Supreme Court ruling the case in favour of Google thus ending its 11-year legal battle with one authors group. The Court refused to hear an appeal from the Authors Guild, claiming that Google had breached the copyright laws by scanning books without permission. This process was started in 2004 for extracting searchable database and the case was started in 2005 by the Authors Guild. The Supreme Court’s judgement is the final ruling on the matter.These informations were used in Google’s database of books which lets people search through millions of titles and read passages and selected pages from them. While some of the books in the database are very old titles that are no longer protected by a copyright, millions of them are more recent publications. For this the Authors Guild had argued that this project undermined the authors’ ability to make money from their work. However Google claimed that its database was a “fair use” of protected works, describing it as “a card catalogue for the digital age”. Though this is a small win for Google the firm could have faced loss of billions of dollars in damages claims from authors in case it had lost the case.