Law note · United States (federal only)
Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google, Inc.
cite 804 F.3d 202 (2d Cir. 2015)
stage IN FORCE in force since 2015-10-16
The Second Circuit held that Google's mass digitization of tens of millions of books and display of limited snippets in search results constituted transformative fair use, because the scanning created new public benefit (full-text search, computational corpus analysis) without substantially substituting for sales of original works.
The case is the leading authority establishing that large-scale ingestion of copyrighted works for indexing and limited display can be fair use, which informs how courts evaluate news aggregation and AI training on news corpora.
Primary source: Justia appellate
decision date confirmed from copyright.gov summary as 2015-10-16