gram 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.
BACKGROUND
- 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.[1] 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.[2]
- 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.[3] 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
- ↑ The Authors Guild, a membership organization of published authors, is also a plaintiff and appellant, seeking injunctive and declaratory relief on behalf of its members. However, in a separate case, this court found that, under the Copyright Act, the Authors Guild lacks standing to sue for copyright infringement on its members’ behalf. Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust, 755 F.3d 87, 94 (2d Cir. 2014). As the three individual author-plainliffs clearly do have standing, their suit and their appeal are properly adjudicated, notwithstanding the Authors Guild’s lack of standing. See Bowsher v. Synar, 478 U.S. 714, 721, 106 S.Ct. 3181, 92 L.Ed.2d 583 (1986) (finding that where one appellee had standing, the court need not consider the standing of other appellees in order to determine the merits of the appeal).
- ↑ Google now honors requests to remove books from snippet view. Some Plaintiffs appear to have had books removed from snippet view.
- ↑ Libraries participating in the Library Project at the the the suit was filed included the University of Michigan, the University of California, Harvard University, Stanford University, Oxford University, Columbia University, Princeton University, Ghent University, Keio University, the Austrian National Library, and the New York Public Library.
