The justices, in a brief written order, said they won’t take up an appeal by the Authors Guild and individual writers who argued Google engaged in copyright infringement “on an epic scale.”

The litigation over Google’s digital book library began more than a decade ago when the nation’s largest professional organization for writers filed a federal lawsuit accusing Google of “massive copyright infringement.”

The last major development came in October when a federal appeals court in New York ruled for Google. That left the Authors Guild with one more option: asking the nation’s highest court to review the case. The group filed a petition to the high court in late December.

The dispute involves the boundaries of “fair use,” the legal doctrine that permits unauthorized copying in certain, limited circumstances. The Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals concluded in October that Google’s scanning millions of copyrighted books wasn’t infringement because what the company makes viewable online is so limited.

Google, which sells ads around its search results, has scanned more than 20 million books since 2004 when it struck an agreement with several big research libraries to digitally copy their collections. The company, which describes Google Books as a “card catalog for the digital age,” allows people to search the texts of the copied books but lets users see only snippets at a time.

A number of prominent writers, including Malcolm Gladwell, Nobel Prize winner J.M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood and playwright Tony Kushner, had urged the Supreme Court to take the case.

In a statement Monday, the president of the Authors Guild, Roxana Robinson, called her organization’s defeat a “colossal loss.”

(Published by The Wall Street Journal - April 18, 2016)