The Fight Over the Future of Digital Books - Dan Cohen - Technology - The Atlantic

"Unlike Google, which ambitiously -- some would say recklessly -- planned to make all scanned books available in some form to the public, from "snippets" to full views, HathiTrust simply wishes to make available for scholarship older, out-of-print books whose authors and publishers cannot be located. Often called "orphan works," these books exist in an unclear realm: still technically in copyright but without identifiable rights-holders. What is very clear is that without the orphanages we call libraries, many of these works would no longer be available for scholars to read. Authors Guild v. HathiTrust is a strange legal twist. For an association of professional writers, the Guild seems to have forgotten some of the basic principles of its craft, such as not placing sympathetic figures like librarians in the role of villains. Almost comically, the Guild's press release trumpeting its lawsuit against HathiTrust augurs a dark day in the not-too-distant future when old works, including obscure Yiddish texts, are "abducted" and "released" to thousands of students and professors...."