Computers and Robots Don't Count

Courts use similar logic in case after case: It's not infringement if computers "read or review" the new copies, only if people do. Completely legal, four courts have agreed, because it's not as though Google is turning the complete books over to people. "Google Books ... is not a tool to be used to read books," wrote one judge. In another strand of the litigation, the parties at one point proposed a settlement that would have allowed "non-consumptive" digital humanities research on the scanned books, defined as "research in which computational analysis is performed on one or more Books, but not research in which a researcher reads or displays substantial portions of a Book to understand the intellectual content presented within the Book." This was fine, in the view of the author and publisher representatives who negotiated the proposed settlement.