Category Archives: Fair Use

Educational Fair Use Update: Congressional Hearings and Cambridge University Press v. Patton

Posted November 18, 2014

Pam Samuelson & Mike Wolfe

At Authors Alliance we keep a close eye on what’s going on in fair use litigations that could have lasting effects on authors whose primary goal is create and disseminate their works with the purpose of advancing knowledge. We are not the only ones, of course, who are monitoring developments on the fair use front. In fact, tomorrow the House Judiciary Committee is holding a hearing on fair use in educational settings.

One case we’ve been following closely is the lawsuit between a group of academic publishers—Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Sage Publications—and officials of Georgia State University. The lawsuit arose because GSU policies have allowed professors to post excerpts from books for use by their students. This has included course websites where professors could upload such materials and an “E-Reserves” system run by the university library whereby professors could arrange for excerpts from works in the library’s collection to be posted online for student access.

Why Digital Humanities Researchers Support Google’s Fair Use Defense

Posted July 31, 2014

Guest-blogged by Authors Alliance member Matthew Sag, a professor at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. Authors Alliance supports Google’s fair use defense because it helps authors reach readers. Matthew provides another reason why this case is important to the advancement of knowledge and scholarship.

Earlier this month a group of more than 150 researchers, scholars and educators with an interest in the ‘Digital Humanities’ joined an amicus brief urging the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to side with Google in this dispute. Why would so many teachers and academics from fields ranging from Computer Science, English Literature, History, Law, to Linguistics care about this lawsuit? It’s not because they are worried about Google—Google surely has the resources to look after itself—but because they are concerned about the future of academic inquiry in a world of ‘big data’ and ubiquitous copyright.

For decades now, physicists, biologists and economists have used massive quantities of data to explore the world around them. With increases in computing power, advances in computational linguistics and natural language processing, and the mass digitization of texts, researchers in the humanities can apply these techniques to the study of history, literature, language and so much more.

Why the Authors Alliance Amicus Brief Supports Google’s Fair Use Defense

Posted July 10, 2014

By Authors Alliance co-founder Pamela Samuelson.

It was nearly a decade ago that the Authors Guild and three of its members brought a class action lawsuit against Google. It charged that Google’s digitization of in-copyright books from major research library collections for its Book Search project was copyright infringement. The plaintiffs have asked for an award of $3 billion in statutory damages against Google and an injunction to remove Book Search from the Internet.

What a tragedy it would be if the Authors Guild prevailed in this lawsuit—and not just for members of the public who have come to depend on Book Search to find information, but also for the overwhelming majority of authors who want their books to be discoverable through full-text searchable databases such as Book Search.

Google’s main defense has always been that this scanning was fair use because it helps users to find books containing information relevant to their queries without harming the market for the books. Indeed, by providing links to online stores from which the books can be purchased, Book Search is likely to enhance the marketability of books in this database.

Google won its fair use at a lower court last fall. The Authors Guild appeal is now pending before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which has long been the most influential court on copyright issues. Oral argument will likely occur in the fall. A decision on the merits should be rendered in the first half of 2015.

The Authors Alliance has today filed a brief in support of the lower court’s fair use ruling. The Alliance has an interest in this litigation because a substantial proportion of our members have books in the Book Search database. Several dozens of books written by Alliance Advisory Board members can, for instance, be found through Book Search. They includes nine by Harvard historian Robert Darnton, seven by Lawrence Lessig, five by Michigan economist Paul Courant, four by former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky, three by former President of the Modern Language Association Sidonie Smith, and one by Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus. Because Authors Alliance members want their books to be found, the organization supports Google’s fair use defense in this case.

HathiTrust Wins Big Victory for Authors in Authors Guild Case

Posted June 10, 2014

By Authors Alliance co-founder Pamela Samuelson.

The Authors Guild may have suffered a major loss today when the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against its copyright infringement lawsuit against HathiTrust. But the HathiTrust win is an important victory for authors who write to be read and want readers to know their works exist.

The Second Circuit ruled that digitizing books for the purpose of enabling researchers to find information contained in books in the HathiTrust digital library is a fair use. With the aid of HathiTrust’s technology, researchers can make a query, for example, to find out how many of the 10 million books in the HathiTrust corpus contain references to anaphylactic shock. HathiTrust does not display the contents of in-copyright books responsive to such a query, but it does inform the researcher of the page numbers of books in physical library collections that are responsive to the query.

To put the point more simply, the court ruled that it is not copyright infringement for libraries to digitize works for the purpose of helping researchers find pertinent books. Authors of research library books often spent years writing them with the goal of sharing the knowledge and insights they contain with interested researchers. That knowledge can now be found using HathiTrust instead of moldering away unread in the physical stacks of research libraries.