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

In August 2010, Google put out a blog post announcing that there were 129,864,880 books in the world. The company said they were going to scan them all.

Of course, it didn’t quite turn out that way. This particular moonshot fell about a hundred-million books short of the moon. What happened was complicated but how it started was simple: Google did that thing where you ask for forgiveness rather than permission, and forgiveness was not forthcoming. Upon hearing that Google was taking millions of books out of libraries, scanning them, and returning them as if nothing had happened, authors and publishers filed suit against the company, alleging, as the authors put it simply in their initial complaint, “massive copyright infringement.”

When Google started scanning, they weren’t actually setting out to build a digital library where you could read books in their entirety; that idea would come later. Their original goal was just to let you search books. For books in copyright, all they would show you were “snippets,” just a few sentences of context around your search terms. They likened their service to a card catalog.

Google thought that creating a card catalog was protected by “fair use,” the same doctrine of copyright law that lets a scholar excerpt someone’s else’s work in order to talk about it. “A key part of the line between what’s fair use and what’s not is transformation,” Google’s lawyer, David Drummond, has said. “Yes, we’re making a copy when we digitize. But surely the ability to find something because a term appears in a book is not the same thing as reading the book. That’s why Google Books is a different product from the book itself.”

It was important for Drummond to be right. Statutory damages for “willful infringement” of a copyright can run as high as $150,000 for each work infringed. Google’s potential liability for copying tens of millions of books could have run into the trillions of dollars. “Google had some reason to fear that it was betting the firm on its fair-use defense,” Pamela Samuelson, a law professor at UC Berkeley, wrote in 2011. Copyright owners pounced.