THEAuthors Guild US vs Google. The accusation leveled by the writers' association against the Mountain View colossus is that of infringement of copyright, in a case on which the Supreme Court will be called to express itself.
Google, in fact, would have digitized about twenty million volumes owned by the major libraries in the country, copying them all, whether or not they were covered by Copyright, and has not offered any compensation for their exploitation, neither to the authors nor to the publishers of the volumes.
A behavior that was contested by the Authors Guild in a lawsuit filed in 2005, in which the Court established that Google had acted in the name of the doctrine of fair use, the so-called reasonable use. A decision that has aroused some perplexities, especially in the light of the commercial purposes of Google, and which has therefore been the subject of an appeal.
According to the Authors Guild, in fact, the Mountain View search engine would have exploited these texts for their own purposes without offering any compensation to the authors, from the most obvious ones (the efficiency in searching for literary content) to the more complex ones, such as the enrichment of language databases and the development of algorithms.
Google's thesis, on the other hand, is that the search service is so convenient for the public that the company, which has a turnover of just under 75 billion dollars in the last year, does not have to pay content providers.
A principle that clearly goes against one of the basic rules of any business (suppliers must be paid) and which could open the door to other looting of literary works, nullifying the right of a writer to earn with his work.
