Why Authors Win Even if Authors Guild Lost | LinkedIn

"The Authors Guild may have suffered a major loss today when the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against its copyright infringement lawsuit against HathiTrust. But the HathiTrust win is an important victory for authors who write to be read and want readers to know their works exist. The Second Circuit ruled that digitizing books for the purpose of enabling researchers to find information contained in books in the HathiTrust digital library is a fair use. With the aid of HathiTrust’s technology, a researcher can make a query, for example, to find out how many of the 10 million books in the HathiTrust corpus contain references to anaphylactic shock. HathiTrust does not display the contents of in-copyright books responsive to such a query, but it does inform the researcher of the page numbers of books in physical library collections that are responsive to the query. To put the point more simply, the court ruled that it is not copyright infringement for libraries to digitize works for the purpose of helping researchers find pertinent books. Authors of research library books often spent years writing them with the goal of sharing the knowledge and insights they contain with interested researchers. That knowledge can now be found in HathiTrust instead of moldering away unread in the physical stacks of research libraries ..."