Authors Guild v. HathiTrust

We submitted an amicus brief on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in support of the HathiTrust “mass digitization” project. HathiTrust, backed by a consortium of university libraries and Google, has digitized millions of copyrighted books and incorporated them into a database without the consent of copyright owners. The brief addressed whether changing a work from print form to a digital database in order to add new uses counts as “transformative” under copyright fair use factor 1. In June 2014, the Second Circuit affirmed the district court’s decision that HathiTrust Digital Library’s use of the copyrighted works for full-text search constitutes a “fair use.” The court also affirmed the district court’s ruling that fair use allows the libraries to provide the works in formats accessible to the print-disabled.