On July 6, 2012, members of the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA), together with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), filed a “friend of the court” brief in Authors Guild v. HathiTrust, urging a federal court to find that the fair use doctrine permitted the creation of a valuable digital library. The brief argues four main points: that the HathiTrust Digital Library (HDL) is serving the public interest, that its tremendous public benefit tilts the analysis firmly in favor of fair use, that a legislative “fix” is both unnecessary and unworkable, and that the plaintiffs helped foster public reliance on the HathiTrust project, which the public should not be deprived of now.
For several years, the HathiTrust and its member libraries have worked to index and preserve digitized works from library collections to foster research, teaching, and learning. In their lawsuit, the Authors Guild, together with a few other author groups and individual authors, propose an extremely narrow view of the rights of libraries to engage in preservation and other core library functions. In their motion for judgment on the pleadings, the plaintiffs have asked the federal court to “mothball” HDL until Congress takes action. LCA members have filed in this case to defend the rights of all libraries, as well as the extraordinary value of the HathiTrust collection. This amicus brief follows a previous one submitted by members of the LCA on April 20, 2012.
Download a PDF of the July 6 amicus brief.
Download a PDF of the April 20 amicus brief.
The Library Copyright Alliance (LCA) consists of three major library associations—the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Association of College and Research Libraries. These three associations collectively represent over 300,000 information professionals and thousands of libraries of all kinds throughout the United States and Canada.http://librarycopyrightalliance.org/.
