> The court could instead have heard a case exclusively about books that were under copyright but not available digital in any form, or one in which a library had some existing licensing arrangement that covered the usage imperfectly, which would have made both the transformation and commercial impact fair use tests more complicated. Instead, IA chose to bring this deeply unsympathetic fact pattern to the 2nd Circuit. Now, in that circuit, if some entity did have that more sympathetic fact pattern, it doesn't matter: the finding here was categorical.

How do you see this as different from the claim that the judge(s) did a bad job?

If you think this ruling is just an obvious application of the law to the facts, then you'd get the same result in a different case.

Or, if you think the ruling is contingent on whether a judge approves of the conduct independently of the law, then the court is the party that screwed this up. In particular, the example you highlight, "the finding here was categorical", is completely at the judges' discretion.

(Or are you saying that this ruling is clearly correct, but you wish that the judges would have gotten confused?)