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Appeals Court Finds Scanning To Be Fair Use

Posted by timothy on from the only-reading-it-for-the-articles dept.

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.

12 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. Hah! by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

    --
    Ezekiel 23:20
    1. Re:Hah! by Mister+Liberty · · Score: 2

      You must be using one of the overrated Adobe products.
      Abbyy Finereader!

  2. Key Point Missing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The summary misses a key point. Yes they scan and store the entire book, but they are _NOT_ making the entire book available to everyone. For the most part they are just making it searchable.

    1. Re:Key Point Missing by NewYorkCountryLawyer · · Score: 2

      The summary misses a key point. Yes they scan and store the entire book, but they are _NOT_ making the entire book available to everyone. For the most part they are just making it searchable.

      Agreed that it's not in the summary, but as you correctly note, it's just a "summary". Anyone who reads the underlying blog post will read this among the facts on which the court based its opinion: "The public was allowed to search by keyword. The search results showed only the page numbers for the search term and the number of times it appeared; none of the text was visible."

      So those readers who RTFA will be in the know.

      --
      Ray Beckerman +5 Insightful
    2. Re:Key Point Missing by radarskiy · · Score: 3, Insightful

      "So what is the point of scanning and making the info from the scan available if they don't reveal anything from the text?"

      The same point behind card catalogs at the library, or Google: so that you can find sources that have the kind of information you are looking for instead of trying to buy all of the books everywhere on the off chance that any one might have what you are looking for.

    3. Re: Key Point Missing by LocalH · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The other main reason would be to prepare the work for public release before it's eventual copyright lapse. That's assuming that Google is still around in 500 years (at least the way copyright extensions are handled it'll likely be at least that long).

      --
      FC Closer
  3. Needless to say by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It doesnt bode well for Google as Google are not using scanning for research, they are a publicly listed corporation scanning books to profit from showing the public books and adverts and selling the resulting data to anyone who will pay them with the authors getting 0 compensation.

    1. Re:Needless to say by plover · · Score: 4, Funny

      ... 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.

      --
      John
  4. Appeals Court Finds Scanning To Be Fair Use by MindPrison · · Score: 2, Funny

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

    Court finds port scanning to be fair.

    --
    What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
  5. Commercialisation is 2 parts of the 4-part test by raymorris · · Score: 2

    Section 107 sets out four factors to be considered in determining whether or not a particular use is fair use:

    The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes

    The nature of the copyrighted work

    The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole

    The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work

    1 and 4 have to do with profit. #1 asks "is the person copying doing so for profit?" #4 asks "how does that effect the profits due the author or their assigns?"

  6. Knowledge by Ultracrepidarian · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "The field of knowledge is the common property of mankind."
    --- Thomas Jefferson (Letter to Henry Dearborn, 1807)

  7. Re:What good is a scanned book if you can't get it by thunderclap · · Score: 2, Interesting

    But what good is a scanned book if it's available but you can't actually access it? Almost everything since 1930 is under copyright, and we're legally denied access to this wealth of information, including works under copyright but orphaned. Scanning books, digitizing them, making them searchable -- and then what? If you can't get the book, what good is it? Almost all books before digital typesetting are available online only in bad-photocopy scanned PDFs, not even full text.

    A sane society would strip the copyright from any book that is not currently available digitally, if the copyright holder (supposing the copyright holder can even be found) has no plans to make it available digitally in the next year, and revert it to the public domain. Then Google - and anyone else - could do whatever they wanted with the text.

    A sane society would have a 14 yr copyright, a president and congress who actually listen to the masses and only serve 4 or six yrs, a Bruce jenner who never married Kris Kardashian because told him it would be his worst mistake ever, a childless Pattie Mallette, a RIAA that served its artists giving them 80% of the money an album earned and didn't attack the people who shared it, muslims and jews who didn't hate each other, women, gays and want to explode themselves in crowded places, a US that didnt spill foreign blood someone in the world every decade for the last 120 yrs and a Microsoft who actually listens and didnt shove metro into 8 or kill xp because it wants too. But back to the topic. No, stripping the copyright from any book that is not currently available digitally, if the copyright holder (supposing the copyright holder can even be found) has no plans to make it available digitally in the next year, and revert it to the public domain would deprive certain authors (example Harlan Ellison and Ursula K. Le Guin ). You want an actual example of this? http://wellpreparedmind.wordpr... its happened in france. Damn those they couldn't find. Me, I am a writer. I want copyright fixed but I don't want my choice taken away either. However, I am in support of this scanning. As for the D&D, well they deserved to be screwed.