For the Authors Guild, it was unquestioningly a violation of publishers' and authors' rights to copy their work wholesale and make "snippets" of it available online.
US circuit judge Denny Chin, in Manhattan, accepted Google's argument that its scanning of more than 20m books, and making snippets of text available for online searches, constituted fair use under US copyright law.
The trend in 2013 was all about making snippets of songs... and then not bothering to finish them.
And I'm cheered that my publishers stand to profit from the settlement and have already made snippets of my book and many others like it available through Google Book Search.
Yet, while molecularization has already sparked an important debate in the social sciences over the last decade (Shostak, 2005; Beck and Niewöhner, 2006; Rose, 2007; Nowotny and Testa, 2011), epigenetics seems to herald a new stage that entails "a highly selective scanning of the socio-material environment in order to make snippets of it available for experimental work at the molecular level.
They have found that cells make tiny snippets of RNA, called microRNA, that silence particular genes.
Google is scanning these books in full but making only "snippets" (the company's term) available on the Web.
Some of the new owners are instant millionaires via the Internet, and know there are fortunes to be made marketing snippets of information and sound and image.
But to make those snippets freely available on the Web, the books must be scanned in their entirety into Google's database to create a searchable index, which the lawsuits claim violates the fair use provision of copyright law.
One of its stars was the producer Brian Burton, better known as Danger Mouse, who is famous for producing "The Grey Album," a clever remix of Jay-Z's "Black Album" using beats made from snippets of the Beatles' "White Album".
