HathiTrust Digital Library Wins Latest Round in Battle With Authors – Wired Campus - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"In what legal observers and fair-use advocates are calling a victory for libraries, a federal appeals court has upheld most of a lower court’s 2012 ruling in favor of the HathiTrust Digital Library in a copyright-infringement lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild and other plaintiffs. The decision is another legal setback for the Authors Guild, which has also been fighting a long court battle over Google’s mass digitizing of books. But the appeals court’s move will encourage both scholars who want to text-mine digitized works and libraries that want to give print-disabled patrons greater access to content, among others. Together with its partner institutions, the digital library holds millions of copies of digitized works, many of them still under copyright. In the ruling, handed down on Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, agreed with the late Judge Harold Baer Jr. of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan that HathiTrust’s creation of a searchable, full-text database of those works counts as fair use. So does making texts available in different formats for the vision-impaired and other users with disabilities that make it hard to use print, the appeals court said. 'That one’s going to have a very large impact because now we have a court of appeals on record holding that providing copies to the print-disabled is fair use,' said James Grimmelmann, a professor of law at the University of Maryland and an expert on intellectual-property issues. 'The holding that search is transformative fair use is basically the same' as the lower court’s, he said. The Second Circuit ruling notes that users doing searches in HathiTrust’s database don’t have access to the full text of the works, which 'fairly refutes the notion that this is a market that book authors could have hoped to license,' Mr. Grimmelmann said ..."