Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google Inc.’s Empirical Analysis
2013
Citation profile
3 federal appellate ·
Relationships
Applies 17 U.S.C. § 106 (§ 101 of the Copyright Act of 1976) · 17 U.S.C. § 107 (§ 101 of the Copyright Act of 1976)
Relies on Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co. · Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises · Sony Corporation of America v. Universal City Studios Inc · Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. · Stewart v. Abend
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 8 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“Google books digitizes books and transforms expressive text into a comprehensive word index that helps readers, scholars, researchers, and others find books.... The use of book text to facilitate search through the display of snippets is transformative.... Similarly, Google Books is also transformative in the sense that it has transformed the book text into data for purposes of substantive research, including data mining and text mining in new areas, thereby opening up new fields of research. Words in books are being used in a way they have not been used before. Google Books has created something new in the use of book text—the frequency of words and trends in their usage provide substantive information.”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority“[On the one hand] Google scans the full text of books — the entire books — and it copies verbatim expression. On the other hand, courts have held that copying the entirety of a work may still be fair use. See, e.g., Sony Corp. of Am. v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 , 449-50, 104 S.Ct. 774 , 78 L.Ed.2d 574 (1984); Bill Graham Archives, 448 F.3d at 613 (”
1 later decision quote this exact passage · from the majority
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.