Last week, in Authors Guild v. HathiTrust,1 the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed the holding of U.S. District Judge Harold Baer,2 that use of the Hathitrust Digital Library (HDL) for the purpose of (i) search and (ii) accessibility each constitute fair use. Co-author Robert J. Bernstein served as co-counsel to Intervenors-Defendants-Appellees National Federation of the Blind, Georgina Kleege, Blair Seidlitz and Courtney Wheeler in the district court and appellate proceedings.
The HDL is a digital compilation of over 10 million books scanned by Google from the collections of the libraries of the University of Michigan, Cornell University, the University of California at Los Angeles, the University of Wisconsin and Indiana University (collectively, the Libraries). The HDL is used by the Libraries for preservation of their collections and by students, faculty, researchers and other patrons of the Libraries for searching and accessibility. In HathiTrust, the court addressed the search and accessibility functions, but remanded the preservation issue for an initial determination of plaintiffs’ standing to raise it.
