On November 14, 2013, the U.S. District Court for the Southern
District of New York dismissed the plaintiff's copyright suit
in The Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google,
Inc. The decision was based on the Court's
determination that Google engaged in "fair use" of the
plaintiffs' copyrighted materials when it scanned over 20
million books and made portions of them available online. Essential
to the Court's decision – and many "fair use"
copyright cases – was the Court's analysis of the nature
of Google's use of the plaintiffs' copyrighted books, which
the Court held to be "transformative."
Google's use of the plaintiffs' copyrighted books was
held to be "transformative" and, therefore weighed
towards a finding of fair use (i.e., no copyright
infringement) because book digitization: (1) created a
"comprehensive word index" that helped readers and
researchers locate books and (2) made it possible to analyze the
words within the books as "data for purposes of
