LCA Files Amicus Brief in Authors Guild v. HathiTrust

“On April 20, 2012, members of the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) filed a friend of the court brief to defend the fair use rights of libraries. The libraries’ brief, prepared by Jonathan Band, responds to the plaintiffs’ distorted view of libraries’ rights, showing that it would affect not only the legitimate and beneficial uses at issue in this case, but also libraries’ rights to provide the most basic services, including lending books and providing Internet access to the public. For several years, the HathiTrust and its member libraries have worked to index and preserve digitized works from library collections to foster research, teaching, and learning. In their lawsuit, the Authors Guild, together with a few other author groups and individual authors, propose an extremely narrow view of the rights of libraries to engage in preservation and other core library functions, and have asked the federal court to pull the plug on the HathiTrust collection. LCA members have filed in this case to defend the rights of all libraries as well as the extraordinary value of the HathiTrust collection. To view a PDF version of the amicus brief, please visit: http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/htamicus-final.pdf”