Transformative Use: An Update on the Google Books Case with Jonathan Band

In spite of early concerns about the quality of its metadata, best summarized by Geoffrey Nunberg in the August 31, 2009 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education , librarians have come to appreciate Google Books for its power to search millions of books and its potential as a “big data” source for the study of language and culture. Thus, the suits filed against Google by the Authors Guild and five publishers in 2005, which were soon consolidated, were viewed by many librarians as a threat to an irreplaceable resource. The suits asserted that Google’s scanning, maintaining a database for searching, and offering searchers short “snippets” of the text of books infringed on copyright. A proposed settlement failed in 2011, and the publishers dropped their litigation in 2012.