Page:Authors Guild v. Google (2015).pdf/7

 does not, at this time and on the record before us, expose Plaintiffs to an unreasonable risk of loss of copyright value through incursions of hackers. Finally, Google’s provision of digital copies to participating libraries, authorizing them to make non-infringing uses, is non-infringing, and the mere speculative possibility that the libraries might allow use of their copies in an infringing manner does not make Google a contributory infringer. Plaintiffs have failed to show a material issue of fact in dispute.

We affirm the judgment.


 * I. Plaintiffs

The author-plaintiffs are Jim Bouton, author of Ball Four; Betty Miles, author of The Trouble with Thirteen; and Joseph Goulden, author of The Superlawyers: The Small and Powerful World of the Great Washington Law Firms. Each of them has a legal or beneficial ownership in the copyright for his or her book. Their books have been scanned without their permission by Google, which made them available to Internet users for search and snippet view on Google’s website.


 * II. Google Books and the Google Library Project

Google’s Library Project, which began in 2004, involves bi-lateral agreements between Google and a number of the world’s major research libraries. Under these agreements, the participating libraries select books from their collections to submit to Google for inclusion in the project. Google makes a digital scan of each hook, extracts a machine-readable text, and creates an index of the machine-readable text of each book. Google retains the original scanned image of each book, in part so as to improve the accuracy of the machine-readable texts and indices us image-to-text conversion technologies improve.

Since 2004, Google has scanned, rendered machine-readable, and indexed more than 20 million books, including both copyrighted works and works in the public domain. The vast majority of the books are non-fiction, and most are out of print. All of the digital information created by Google in the process is stored on servers protected by the same security systems Google uses to shield its own confidential information.

The digital corpus created by the scanning of these millions of books enables the Google Books search engine. Members of the public who access the Google Books