Armageddon on the digital superhighway: Will Google's e-library project weather the storm?

This paper examines the concept of copyright as an intellectual property in the digital age and the utilitarian objective which an intellectual property seeks to achieve. In that respect ‘fair use’ as a concept of U.S. copyright law has been critically analysed. An ongoing Court battle involving the dispute between Google and the Author's Guild & Publishers has been examined and an attempt has been made to justify the act of Google under the fair use doctrine. At the heart of the work, one shall be able to appreciate the pressing need for the copyright laws to be rewritten for the digital age. Recourse has been made to numerous case law to appreciate the concept of fair use and this paper concludes by holding Google's project of digitizing copyrighted books as ‘fair’ as it fulfills the primary aim of copyright law which is “encouragement of learning” and “dissemination of knowledge”.