The Authors Guild’s dispute with Google over scanning copyrighted works could reach the Supreme Court.
The case began in 2005, when the writer’s group accused Google of “massive copyright infringement.” The case has had many twists and turns along the way. In October 2015, a judge upheld Google’s appeal that its efforts to scan millions of books for its digital library does not violate copyright law.
Now, publishers are petitioning the Supreme Court to hear the copyright-infringement case against Google brought by the Authors Guild. In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, Author’s Guild president Roxana Robinson explains why. Here is an excerpt:
Google claims that it would be “prohibitive” to pay the authors for using their work, but that’s not an acceptable response. Paying suppliers is simply a cost of doing business. It isn’t acceptable for one of the world’s richest companies to claim that it needn’t pay for content that plays such a crucial part in its financial success. Google depends on these texts to make its search engine one of the best in the world, and that superiority is what drives its ad revenues. Content draws traffic, and traffic drives ad revenues.