Authors beaten in online library dispute
Five US universities can continue digitising copyrighted works in the HathiTrust online library, after a district judge ruled that the project is protected by the fair use defence.
The University of Michigan, Cornell University, University of California, Indiana University and the University of Wisconsin System have digitised about 10 million works to date. The Authors Guild and other groups sued the universities, arguing that they reproduced and distributed the copyrighted works without authorisation.
But on October 11 at the US District Court Southern District of New York, Judge Harold Baer dismissed the suit and said the defendants were protected by fair use, which can apply to the copying of works used for teaching and research.
Under an agreement between Google and the defendants, Google digitised works from the universities’ libraries (placing them in the Google Books program) and provided these copies to the defendants (putting them in the HathiTrust digital library). Of the 10 million digital works in the HathiTrust, around 73 percent are protected by copyright.
Readers can conduct full-text searches of works with known authors. For works not in the public domain or for which the copyright owner has not authorised use, the full-text search indicates only the page numbers on which a particular term is found and the number of times the terms appears on the page.
The Authors Guild, which represents more than 8,000 US authors, and others argued that the defendants’ statuses as educational non-profits should not shield them from charges of copyright infringement. However, Baer said: “The cases they cite in support of this claim are cases where the use being made by the non-profit was not transformative, as it is here.”
In support of the defendants, he said: “I cannot imagine a definition of fair use that would not encompass the transformative uses made by the defendants’ MDP [HathiTrust programme] and would require that I terminate this invaluable contribution to the progress of science and cultivation of the arts.”
In a statement, the Authors Guild said it disagreed with “nearly every aspect of the court’s ruling. We’ll be discussing the decision with our colleagues and co-plaintiffs in Europe, Canada, and Australia and expect to announce our next steps shortly”.
Anne Kenney, librarian at Cornell University, one of the defendants in the case, said in a statement on the university’s website: “Needless to say, I am pleased with the decision. I believe it is in the public interest and will also benefit authors and publishers.”
Google’s use of the works under its Google Books program is part of a separate but unresolved dispute in the US with the Authors Guild. In October, Google settled another suit with the Association of American Publishers that allows publishers to decide which works should, or should not, be in Google’s online library.
