Google Books Appeal Is Thrown Out By The Supreme Court

It's been a little while since we've heard anything about the Authors' Guild and their lawsuit against Google. The Guild sought legal action against the search engine giant for their Google Books project, in which they scanned millions of books. The reason we haven't heard much about this case in a while is because Google won the lawsuit back in 2013. But that didn't stop case from continuing.

The idea behind Google Books was to preserve millions of bodies of texts, and put them into a searchable database. Users could look up and read passages from the books. And the fact that in most cases, only snippets were made available, instead of the entire book, is why Google ended up with a ruling in their favor.

As with any major court case, the Authors' Guild sought an appeal to the ruling. The case made its way to the US Supreme Court, where it ended its 11-year run. The Supreme Court stated that they would not even hear the appeal. And since the Supreme Court is the highest court, the case can finally be put to rest.

Understandably, the Authors' Guild was "disappointed" that the appeal would not even be heard by the Supreme Court. As for Google, a spokewoman stated that they "are grateful that the court has agreed to uphold the decision of the Second Circuit which concluded that Google Books is transformative and consistent with copyright law."

VIA: BBC