Authors Guild, Inc. v. Hathi Trust

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals has issued a ruling in the case of Authors Guild v. Hathi Trust. See Justia for full text of ALL pleadings including the decision.

See Assn. of Research Libraries' posting here for some partisan explanation and hyperlinks to amicus briefs.

The Authors Guild website does not offer documents, but does have statements.

And the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) offers another point of view, placing the lawsuit in the context of the Google Books project law suits.

The clearest, most succinct summary of the ruling comes from a business lawyer blogger who runs Recording INdustry vs. The People, who posted a report on Friday June 13, 2014, "Second Circuit OKs Scanning Whole Books." He summarizes the background that the Hathi Trust members began scanning books, participating in the Google Book Project (The Trust members are very large research libraries, mostly at large, research universities). The books are owned, in the libraries' collections. The trust began making a searchable database of the full text of the books available to 3 groups of people:

1. The public may search with key word searches. The results come back, showing no text of the works, but only showing the frequency of the words, and page numbers on which the words occur.

2. People with disabilities which prevent them from holding or manipulating books, turning pages may have access to the full text of the books. [note from Betsy: This is a different population than those usually served. Most disability programs are designed for visually impaired readers, and they are well served. Those who cannot hold print books or manage them with their hands have no programs that I know of.]

3. Members of the Hathi Trust (that is, the libraries) could replace lost, stolen or damaged books with a copy made from a digital version, IF they could not purchase a replacement on the market at a "fair" price.

The 3 judge panel ruled that the first two uses by access groups do not violate the copyrights of the Author Guild rightsholders. They ruled that the Authors Guild does not have standing to challenge the 3rd use.

Hathi Trust sued over Orphan Works Project mistake

The Chronicle of Higher Education alerts readers in a brief article dated September 14 in the Research section, "In Authors' Suit Against Libraries, an Attempt to Wrest Back Some Control Over Digitized Works," by Jennifer Howard, to a law suit filed on Sept. 12 by the Authors Guild among others against Universities of Michigan, California, Wisconsin, Indiana and Cornell and and the Hathi Trust over their Orphan Works Project. At the Authors Guild website, you can get an announcement and description of the suite along with a link to a PDF of the complaint, filed in the Southern District of New York. Apparently, the Authors Guild, joined by similar authors groups from Australia, Quebec, and the United Kingdom searched through the list of orphan works at the Hathi Trust site, and found a number that they could trace to existing authors. Rather than send corrections to the universities and Hathi Trust, which they specifically request, the authors' organizations filed suit (see the text from the University of Michigan Orphan Works page):

For Copyright Holders - We Want to Hear From You! If you are a bona fide copyright holder – or the authorized representative for a copyright holder – for a title on the Orphan Candidate list, contact us to let us know about your copyright in the book. Kindly fill out this PDF, and send it to us to help us respond as quickly as possible. We will include the copyright information in our record for the book and ask for your instruction on how and whether we may provide access to the digital version. Many copyright holders, especially scholars, are eager to make their out-of-print books available for reading in the HathiTrust. We offer that as an option for any copyright holder who wishes to do so. Copyright holders may identify themselves at any time. Even if you contact us after the 90-day period, we will honor your wishes.

(you should visit the page because the text size and layout makes the bolded text I am emphasizing here even more prominent.) On the other hand, some of the "orphan works" included in the original list were apparently ludicrously easy to link to existing authors. So to some extent, the Hathi group brought this on themselves through sloppy work. there is an article at Library Journal by David Rapp that quotes the University of Michigan released statement that argues that the flawed release of the orphan works list actually achieved the aim, though they will revisit the methods and refine them to

create a more robust, transparent, and fully documented process, we will proceed with the work, because we remain as certain as ever that our proposed uses of orphan works are lawful and important to the future of scholarship and the libraries that support it.

Alternative to Google Books: Hathi Trust signs Summon as search engine -

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that HathiTrust has made its large library of digital texts searchable by signing an agreement with Summon, a library-specific search engine produced by Serials Solutions. Indeed, if you click on the HathiTrust link, you will see that they now offer catalog and full text searches, as well as browsing on their site.

Looking at the Search tips, they offer phrase searches in both the catalog and full text searches. They offer wild card searches, for both single and multiple characters, ONLY in the catalog search. They allow Boolean searching, with AND, OR, and NOT searches in both catalog and full text searches. You can also search subsets of books in full text searching. So you can select to search a private collection of books, for instance, in the full text search. There is advanced searching in the catalog search only, so far. They say they are "exploring" advanced search for the full text option. You cannot search non-text material, such as graphs or illustrations. There are much more details on searching, especially surrounding foreign language works.

If you are affiliated with a library that is part of the HathiTrust, you can get the entire text of a book that is in the public domain by searching HathiTrust. If you are not affiliated with such a library, what you get is a single page with your terms. If, however, the book is in the Google Books collection, you can go from the HathiTrust search on into GoogleBooks, and get it there. This information is provided at the HathiTrust Search Tips site under Printing/Downloading. They also remind users that they can locate many of the items in physical form in the libraries near them or by inter-library loan through those libraries. HathiTrust would like feedback from users who find problem pages, or otherwise have comments on the service.

The GoogleBooks Settlement which recently was rejected by the judge in the case, would have allowed the HathiTrust to post snippets of text along with search results, according to the Chronicle article. But the HathiTrust search results now will only display the page or pages of the document on which the search term appears. You can select the result, and retrieve the page or pages, and the term will be highlighted in a certain format. You can see either a "page view" which is like a PDF of the page, or a text view, where they will add the highlighting. (from HathiTrust SearchTips, under Search Tips. Readers who use screen readers and OCR software will want the text view, of course.

The decoration is the Hathi logo, an elephant, from their own website.

National Digital Library Proposal

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an exciting article on a proposal for a National Digital Library. There are a cluster of related articles, but you may not be able to read them without a Chronicle password. Fortunately, Robert Darnton of Harvard, who is spearheading the proposal, has put a lengthy essay about his arguments, in a more accessible place, at the New York Review of Books. In the essay, A Library Without Walls, he sets forth his utopian vision for a national digital library. I am not sure quite how this either builds upon or competes with either Hathi Trust Digital Library, which already exists, or the Google Book Project, and Google Scholar. Darnton's essay is lovely to read, full of stirring language, referring to Enlightenment ideals and actual projects in a number of other countries to digitize their national libraries.

At Harvard, we have conducted a preliminary survey of the projects underway in other nations. We have even located an incipient NDL in Mongolia. The Dutch are now digitizing every Dutch book, pamphlet, and newspaper produced from 1470 to the present. President Sarkozy of France announced last November that he would make €750 million available to digitize the nation’s cultural “patrimony.” And the Japanese Diet voted for a two-year, 12.6 billion yen crash program to digitize their entire national library. If the Netherlands, France, and Japan can do it, why can’t the United States?

I propose that we dismiss the notion that a National Digital Library of America is far-fetched, and that we concentrate on the general goal of providing the American people with the kind of library they deserve, the kind that meets the needs of the twenty-first century. We can equip the smallest junior college in Alabama and the remotest high school in North Dakota with the greatest library the world has ever known. We can open that library to the rest of the world, exercising a kind of “soft power” that will increase respect for the United States worldwide. By creating a National Digital Library, we can make our fellow citizens active members of an international Republic of Letters, and we can strengthen the bonds of citizenship at home.

Quite stirring and very exciting, but I am a bit confused about how his project relates to the afore-mentioned existing projects. If it manages to pull them together into something that will definitely become and remain open to the public, that would, indeed, be something worth cheering about.