The courts finally decided in favor of Google in the long running court case between the tech company who thrives on indexing, and commoditizing, the world’s information and the Author’s Guild over scanning and indexing copyrighted books.

In brief, Google’s argument was that this is fair use, the oft cited, but rarely litigated principle that copyright doesn’t prevent certain activities that naturally flow from using the work or are in the common good. The Author’s Guild argued, basically, that even if Google wasn’t wholesale distributing the works, they were profiting off of them by scanning them and using them as targets for search queries alongside which they placed ads. This was something, they felt, that the copyright holders had a right to do, or not do, for themselves.

The optimistic view of this ruling is that it provides a high profile stamp of approval to the principle of fair use, making the flow of ideas easier, and making it more difficult for corporations or estates to lock down pieces of the common culture, preventing them from being used in new and interesting ways because they are afraid that they can’t anticipate the consequences.

The pessimistic view is that this is less about fair use and more about the big guy wins. Intellectual property law is ever more becoming a tool for large corporations, not a basic protection for individual creators. In that light, this ruling is hard to see without a twinge of fear that the principle on display here isn’t fair use, but what the bigger, wealthier guy wants to do.

I can only hope that when it is the movie industry against an individual or small firm or a conglomeration of individual authors trying to defend their rights on safer ground, the ruling there will defend the principle of fairness and not the creed that the activity of our economic titans must not be disturbed.