Digitizing Books

choi

(1) Robert Levine, Google Books’ Win May Threaten Other Media. Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Oct 26, 2015
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/ar ... hreaten-other-media

Note:
(a) summary underneath the title in print: An appellate court decision broadens fair use online
(b) “The saga has had enough twists and turns to fill a—well, you know.”

I google with the search term (enough twists and turns to fill a) (without quotation marks), and find: “to fill a voluminous book,” “to fill up a thriller,” “to fill a Tolstoy novel many times over,” “to interest any mystery fan,” and “to keep the reader turning pages into the wee hours of the morning.”
(c) This article is about this decision, which has no effect on the 2012 settlement:

Authors Guild v Google, Inc (CA2; Oct 16, 2015) _ F.3d _
www.ca2.uscourts.gov/decisions/i ... doc/13-4829_opn.pdf
(Aiming to scan every book on earth but without prior consent from book authors or publishers, "Google makes and retains digital copies [that are machine-readable] of books submitted to it by major libraries, allows the libraries that submitted a book to download and retain a digital copy, and allows the public to search the texts of the digitally copied books and see displays of snippets of text [without pay or ad]. The district court granted summary judgment based on its conclusion that Google’s copying is fair use" and we affirm)
(d) BusinessWeek: "After a seven-year legal battle, in 2012 the major US publishers reached a settlement with Google that allows them to keep copyrighted books from being displayed. On Oct 16 the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld a lower court ruling in favor of Google and against the Authors Guild, meaning writers can’t stop the search giant from adding their work to its online library of more than 20 million books. * * * a proposed settlement—eventually rejected by the lower court"

The writing is confusing, because it is poorly written. What happened is Authors Guild AND publishers sued Google in federal district court in Manhattan (Dennis Chin was district judge, who was recently elevated to circuit judge in the US Court of Appeals for the second circuit (short hand notation: CA2; see (c)). The parties' 2011 settlement was rejected (by Chin), but the 2012 settlement (to withhold copyrighted materials at the request of publisher through an author) did not need court's approval and went into effect. For the last clause, see

Google, Publishers Settle Book-Scanning Dispute. Associated Press, Oct 4, 2012
http://www.usatoday.com/story/te ... ng-dispute/1613347/
(“Google and the publishers say the new settlement won't require court approval because it involves only parties to the litigation. Publishers will get to choose which books are included” in Google Books project)

choi

(2) Erik Eckholm, Sacrificing a Legal Trove for the Digital Age. New York Times, Oct 29, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/2 ... -free-database.html

Quote:

In terms of legal collection in US, "no place, save the Library of Congress, can match the collection at Harvard’s Law School Library. Its trove includes nearly every state, federal, territorial and tribal judicial decision since colonial times.

"Harvard librarians are slicing off the spines of all but the rarest volumes and feeding some 40 million pages through a high-speed scanner. They are taking this once unthinkable step to create a complete, searchable database of American case law that will be offered free on the Internet * * *

"Though the primary documents [mainly court decisions] are formally in the public domain [free to the public], many are not put online [courts released decisions online for about a decade, but prior to that in paper form, which publishing companies often digitized and charge] in a convenient format, if at all.

Currently: "Legal groups spend anywhere from thousands of dollars a year, for a small office, to millions, for a giant firm, using commercial services like Westlaw and LexisNexis to find cases and trace doctrinal strands.

"Complete state results will become publicly available this fall for California and New York, and the entire library will be online in 2017, said Daniel Lewis, chief executive and co-founder of Ravel Law, a commercial start-up in California that has teamed up with Harvard Law for the project. The cases will be available at www.ravellaw.com.

Note: Project: Free the Law. Harvard University, undated.
librarylab.law.harvard.edu/projects/free-the-law