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The Tragedy of Google Books (2017)

“Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them.”

But Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc. became famous for its holding that as long as a copying device was capable of “substantial noninfringing uses”—like someone watching home movies—its makers couldn’t be held liable for copyright infringement. “If you have a kind of an institutional problem,” said Jeff Cunard, a partner at Debevoise & Plimpton who represented the publishers in the case, “you can address the issue through a class-action settlement mechanism, which releases all past claims and develops a solution on a going-forward basis. “Their whole thought process is coming out of France and Hugo and those guys that like, you know, ‘My work is my enfant,’” he said, “and the state has absolutely no right to do anything with it—kind of a Lockean point of view.” As the world has flattened, copyright laws have converged, lest one country be at a disadvantage by freeing its intellectual products for exploitation by the others.

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