HathiTrust Decision: Good News for Media That Matters | Center for Media & Social Impact

"The June 10 appeals court decision on HathiTrust advances the useability of fair use, protects innovation and helps makers of media that matters. HathiTrust is a service of a consortium of more than 90 libraries. They pooled the digital versions of their collections—created with the help of Google, which independently uses the digital copies for its Google Books project—and make them available in an open, searchable database. If the books are in the public domain, you can read them. If not, you can search text and find out what pages that text appears on. Also, if you are blind, you can get a full-text version that you can use, even if it is in copyright. The Authors Guild said that HathiTrust violated authors’ copyrights, by making full-text copies available to disabled people and by creating a search tool that searches copyrighted material. The appeals court not only disagreed (although less flamboyantly than the lower court did) but made clear that fair use applied to the different functions of HathiTrust. As Andrew McDiarmid explained at the Center for Democracy and Technology’s blog ..."