Appeals Court Finds Scanning To Be Fair Use

NewYorkCountryLawyer (912032) writes In Authors Guild v Hathitrust, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has found that scanning whole books and making them searchable for research use is a fair use. In reaching its conclusion, the 3-judge panel reasoned, in its 34-page opinion (PDF), that the creation of a searchable, full text database is a "quintessentially transformative use", that it was "reasonably necessary" to make use of the entire works, that maintaining four copies of the database was reasonably necessary as well, and that the research library did not impair the market for the originals. Needless to say, this ruling augurs well for Google in Authors Guild v. Google, which likewise involves full text scanning of whole books for research.

Comments

Hah!

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I tried to scan the court opinion into my research database but my OCR full-text indexer couldn't even understand the first three lines! Must be DRM'ed or something.

Appeals Court Finds Scanning To Be Fair Use

[MindPrison]

Yeah, for a split second there...I read it as:

Court finds port scanning to be fair.

Re:Needless to say

[plover]

... because prostitution is illegal in a lot of places.

Apparently it's illegal in the same places where carriage returns, line feeds, paragraphs, and coming to a logical conclusion are illegal, too.