Google Books Wins Case Against Authors Over Putting Works Online
26th February 2018
A New York court has dismissed a lawsuit against Google by authors who accused the internet giant of digitally copying millions of books for an online library without permission.
US circuit judge Denny Chin, in Manhattan, accepted Google’s argument that its scanning of more than 20m books, and making snippets of text available for online searches, constituted fair use under US copyright law.
The fact remains that so-called ‘intellectual property’ is not ‘property’ in the sense that the term in used both in the law and in ordinary use. Property is something that, when you have it, other people don’t and can’t use it. You and I can both have and enjoy a copy of a book or a TV show or a poem or a software program at the same time without interfering with anyone else doing the same thing. Copyright is an artificial government-created and government-enforced monopoly designed in pursuit of a particular public policy agenda, as the U.S. Constitution makes clear and most writing on the subject admits. Calling it ‘property’ is an intellectual verbal shell game, like software ‘piracy’ and ‘price gouging’. The world would be a better place if people were just honest.