Big changes may be afoot in copyright law these days, via both
litigation and legislation. Courts are considering sweeping
infringement claims with potentially far-reaching implications, and
Congress is beginning the process of a massive overhaul of
copyright statutes. We provide here a brief rundown of some recent
developments.
Authors Guild v. Google
As we have
reported
previously, the Authors Guild and representative individual
authors have been waging a long-running battle in the Southern
District of New York against Google's GoogleBooks project, an
effort to digitize the collections of major libraries and make them
available for public searching. The plaintiffs allege that the
scanning of copyrighted books, and the ability of users to see
"snippets" of the books in response to their searches, is
a violation of copyright. Google asserts that its actions qualify
as fair use.
