1) What was the main debate of the Author’s Guild v. Google?

The case debates the legal right for google to use copyrighted books in its training
database in order to train its google book search algorithm. The author’s guild alleged
that the development of the google book search database infringed upon the copyright
of millions of books.

2) On what grounds did the U.S Circuit Judge Denny Chin dismiss the lawsuit?

The U.S Circuit Judge Denny Chin dismissed the law suit as the Google books
program meets all the legal requirements for “fair use” and he also believes that
Google Books provide significant public benefits in advancing the progress of the
arts and sciences.

3) What is the purpose of the Author’s guild to still pursue this case?

Google copied 20 million books to create a massive and uniquely valuable database,
all without asking for copyright permission or paying their authors a cent,  It never
even bought a single book. That, in itself, was an act of theft.

4) What are the negative effects of the availability of free books

The negative effects are that people won’t buy nearly as many books, that means all
the highest selling authors won’t be able to make a direct living from writing books
alone. Many authors will take on other work to make ends meet and thus the number
of quality books written will drastically decrease.

5) What are the two most important lessons of this case

a) Using copyrighted material in a dataset that is used to train a discriminative

machine-learning algorithm (such as for search purposes) is perfectly legal.
b) Using copyrighted material in a dataset that is used to train a generative machine-
learning algorithm has precedent on its side in any future legal challenge.