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Book Digitization Ruling Shifts Transformative Use Analysis

By Robert J. Bernstein and Robert W. Clarida
July 02, 2014

The HathiTrust Digital Library (HDL) is a digital compilation of over 10 million books scanned by Google from the collections of the libraries of the University of Michigan, Cornell University, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Wisconsin and Indiana University. The HDL is used by the libraries for preservation of their collections and by students, faculty, researchers and other patrons for searching and accessibility.

The HDL's search function enables researchers to input search terms and obtain a list of the books containing the terms and the pages within the books on which the terms appear. The accessibility function enables blind and other print-disabled persons to have complete access to the entire text of all books in the HDL through the use of now-widely available screen access software that magnifies or vocalizes the digitized text or displays the text as refreshable braille.

Last month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that use of the HathiTrust Digital Library for the purpose of search and accessibility each constitutes fair use. Authors Guild Inc. v. HathiTrust, 12-4547. (The appeals court remanded the preservation issue for an initial determination of the plaintiffs' standing to raise it.)

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