Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust

Today´s post will be about a case that was considered Fair Use. The aim is to demonstrate Fair Use in real life situation :)

 Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust

Thirteen university libraries decided to create digital repository of all books in their libraries and created the organization called HathiTrust which was formed to create and operate HathiTrust digital library (HDL). HDL contained both text and image copies of the books and permitted three ways in which digital copies could be used: 

• people from general public could search for the key word in the whole repository. The results would show only book titles, page numbers where the phrase or word appeared and number of times the phrase/word appeared there
• customers of member libraries with a certified disability including blindness, physical disabilities; could access the full text of any (copyrighted) book in the repositary. The reason was that they wanted them to have an ability to access the content through e.g. text-to-speech software
• for the members of HDL library, there was an ability to access a full digital copy of any book in HDL if the member of library originally owned a copy of a the certain book and the original copy was stolen, lost, destroyed or could now be replaced or accessed by a fair price

Due to the fact that some of the books were still protected by the copyright law, HathiTrust and it´s members were sued by twenty authors and author´s associations including he Authors Guild for copyright infrigement. 

What was the decision?

The district court decided in favor of universities and HathiTrust with the explanation that all uses provided and permitted by the HDL were Fair Uses. According to the "factor one" from the "Four factors" discussed in the previous post, the digitalzation of copyrighted works with the purpose of full-text searches was a transformative use. The amount copied was not excessive which is the "third factor" and the aim and function was not to substitute the original books, so the original books did not lose or were in danger of losing any revenue. In regards to the "third factor", the authors did not present a sufficient argument. Additionally, regardless of the lack of a transformative purpose of providing full digital access to copyrighted works to the disabled members, thefair Use doctrine allows this because Unite States Congress had the intent that copyright law accomodate those, who are blind or print disabled. 

If you are more interested in this issue or other Fair Use cases, you can look at some links below:
https://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives/2015/01/top-10-fair-use-cases-of-2014-guest-blog-post.htm
https://www.lexisnexis.com/lawschool/resources/p/casebrief-authors-guild-inc-v-hathitrust-2014720853.aspx
http://web.mst.edu/~canisr/legalenvironment/cases/authorsguild.pdf
https://www.quimbee.com/cases/the-authors-guild-inc-v-hathitrust

Image source: https://www.theodysseyonline.com/fair-use-what-and-why-needs-protecting