Authors Guild v. Google
A decade-long fight over Google Books that ended in 2015 with the scanning of millions of books for search ruled fair use.
From 2004 Google scanned books from major university libraries without asking rights holders, letting users search the full text and see short snippets. The Authors Guild sued in 2005. A 2008 settlement would have made Google a sort of collective manager of orphan works, but Judge Denny Chin rejected it in 2011 as overreaching.
Chin then took up the merits and found in 2013 that the project was fair use. The Second Circuit affirmed in 2015 in an opinion by Judge Pierre Leval — the man who coined "transformative use": making books searchable served a new purpose, and snippets didn't substitute for buying them. The Supreme Court passed in 2016. The ruling is now the precedent everyone reaches for in the AI training disputes.