The Supreme Court backed an appeals court Monday in siding with the legality of Google's digital library of more than 20 million books, The New York Times reports.
The Authors Guild and several writers sued Google way back in 2005, arguing that the tech giant's digitization project was large-scale copyright infringement. Google Books users can search for keywords in the books and view some pieces of the text.
"The purpose of the copying is highly transformative, the public display of text is limited, and the revelations do not provide a significant market substitute for the protected aspects of the originals," Judge Pierre N. Leval wrote as part of the three-judge panel that in 2015 ruled Google's database lawful.
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