THE hero of “The Library of Babel”, a story by Jorge Luis Borges, loses himself in a gargantuan repository of every possible book in the universe. Google Books isn’t quite that vast, but it is big. Since 2004, Google has teamed up with libraries to scan over 20m titles—many of them out of print—and put them on the web for all to view. Users cannot read whole books unless they are in the public domain. But unlike the sad character in Borges’s tale, who never finds the library catalogue, Google Books browsers can search for specific phrases and read snippets of countless volumes, free.

A decade ago a group of alarmed authors sued Google, claiming the service cut into their copyrights. After years of legal machinations, a federal district court ruled in favour of the internet giant in 2013. The plaintiffs appealed to the Second Circuit Court in New York. On October 16th, they were rebuffed again.

How can a company get away with digitising millions of books without the authors’ consent and showing them to the world? In his ruling, Judge Pierre Leval explained that copyright law gives “potential creators” the exclusive right to copy their own work in order to expand everybody’s “access to knowledge”. It is not all about enriching authors. The “ultimate, primary intended beneficiary”, he wrote, “is the public.”

Besides, if the work is put to a “transformative purpose”, it counts as permissible “fair use” under the Copyright Act of 1976. Google does just that, said Judge Leval, by uploading millions of books and rendering them searchable by the masses. The “purpose of Google’s copying of the original copyrighted books”, the ruling reads, “is to make available significant information about those books, permitting a searcher to identify those that contain a word or term of interest.” Another tool enables Googlers “to learn the frequency of usage of selected words in the aggregate corpus of published books in different historical periods”. Both these functions were “quintessentially transformative”.

The ruling does not give away the store: Google supplies only three eighth-of-a-page snippets for each book. And publishers and authors may opt out of snippet-showing altogether. But the Second Circuit ruling gives ordinary readers instant access to a world of knowledge—and one far more friendly and manageable than Borges imagined.