• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, April 15, 2014

“Google's massive, unauthorized digitization campaign has acutely harmed the interests of the authors and other rightsholders whose works have been copied,” the Authors Guild argues in court papers that were made public late last week. “Google has lured potential book buyers away from online bookstores and provided no compensation to rightsholders for Google’s revenue-generating uses of their books.”

The Authors Guild initially sued Google in 2005, arguing that the company had no right to digitize library books and make snippets available to searchers.

Last year, Circuit Court Judge Denny Chin rejected those claims. He said in a sweeping ruling that Google's project is protected by fair use principles because it offers “significant public benefits.”

“It has given scholars the ability, for the first time, to conduct full-text searches of tens of millions of books. It preserves books, in particular out-of-print and old books that have been forgotten in the bowels of libraries, and it gives them new life,” Chin wrote. “It generates new audiences and creates new sources of income for authors and publishers. Indeed, all society benefits.”

The Authors Guild is now asking the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals in New York to reverse Chin's ruling. Among other arguments, the authors' organization says that Chin didn't adequately consider that Google profits from the books due to its “ad-laden search results pages,” which offer users links to book snippets.

“For example,” writes the Authors Guild, “a search for 'Steve Hovley' yielded not only an excerpt from ... Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, but also paid advertisements for three public records search services and eBay.” The organization adds: “In this way, Google derives direct commercial benefit from the authors’ words, phrases, and creative expression.”

The Authors Guild also contends that Google is “playing with fire” by exposing books “to the same types of risks of digital piracy that battered the market for sound recordings.”

Hollywood studios are siding with the Authors Guild on the question. This week, the Motion Picture Association of America argued in a friend-of-the-court brief that “unlicensed copying” could disrupt the current copyright system. The MPAA takes issue with the idea that Google is protected by fair use principles because it increased the public's access to certain books. “Every instance of mass copyright infringement arguably increases access to the infringed works and thereby enables members of the public to use those works in their own creative or educational pursuits. Yet, this fact hardly makes the copying 'fair'," the MPAA argues.