COPYCENSE

In September 2011, the Authors Guild, various international authors’ rights organizations and one dozen individual authors sued HathiTrust, Cornell, and the presidents of the universities of Michigan, California, Wisconsin and Indiana, claiming that HathiTrust’s online storage, searchability and public availability of a digital corpus developed as part of the Google Books scanning project constituted copyright infringement. More than three-quarters of the books that Google scanned as part of the Books project remain subject to copyright protection.

In June 2011, Michigan announced it would share with the public “orphan works” — works to presumed to be subject to copyright protection, but for whom a copyright owner cannot be found.

On October 10, 2012, Judge Harold Baer issued a 23-page decision that held, among other things, that HathiTrust’s activities are consistent with the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976.

The remainder of this post summarizes the key holdings from the decision.
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