Google wins long US court battle over vast project to scan every book in the world

Google’s massive book-scanning project has cleared what may be its final legal hurdle, with the US Supreme Court denying an appeal that contended it violates copyright law.

The top US court on Monday denied without comment a petition from the Authors Guild to hear the appeal of a 2013 federal court ruling seen as a landmark copyright decision for the digital era.

In a decade-long case, authors and their backers claimed Google was illegally scanning and digitising millions of books without compensation to the copyright holders. Google had previously said it wanted to scan every book in the world, estimating in 2010 that there were about 130 million titles.

It has so far scanned about 25 million books.

The ruling by federal judge Denny Chin, backed by an appellate court panel, said the colossal project in which Google allows users to search it’s database of digitised books and see snippets of text was “fair use” under copyright law.

Google said in a statement after Monday’s decision, “We are grateful that the court has agreed to uphold the decision of the Second Circuit [appeals court] which concluded that Google Books is transformative and consistent with copyright law.”