Fair Use Victory in HathiTrust Litigation « The Berkeley Blog

"Today the University of California, Berkeley shared in a legal victory as the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued its decision in Author’s Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust. The court held that the doctrine of fair use allows HathiTrust to create a full‐text searchable database of copyrighted works and to provide those works in formats accessible to those with disabilities. All ten UC campuses and the California Digital Library are part of the HathiTrust partnership of more than eighty academic and research institutions. The members of HathiTrust collaborated to create the HathiTrust Digital Library ('HDL') and made the books in their collections available for inclusion in the HDL. The HDL contains digital copies of more than ten million works, published over many centuries, written in a multitude of languages, covering almost every subject imaginable. The court held that two practices of HathiTrust were a fair use of the underlying copyrighted works, and thus did not amount to copyright infringement. First, HathiTrust provides a search interface that allows users to search for terms across the entire repository. The search results will typically only show the page numbers on which the search term is found and the number of times the term appears on the page, unless the copyright holder has authorized broader use ... Second, the University of Michigan’s library, as a HathiTrust member, provides patrons having certified print disabilities access to the full text of copyrighted works. Not only patrons that are blind, but also those patrons that may be incapable of physically holding a book or turning pages can obtain certification of such a print disability from a qualified expert and then obtain access to the digital library utilizing adaptive software that reads aloud or magnifies the text.  The court held that each of these activities was a fair use and reserved judgment on a third library preservation activity in which member institutions could print a replacement copy of a lost or damaged book in their collection should one not be available at a fair price ..."