Hathi Trust and Copyright Breana Mc Cracken University
Hathi. Trust and Copyright Breana Mc. Cracken University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign What is Hathi. Trust? Copyright Issues - Founded in October 2008 - A partnership, built from over 100 partner institutions and libraries from around the world; hosted at the U. of Michigan - A digital preservation repository, providing longterm guaranteed preservation and access for public domain volumes as well as titles owned by partner libraries that are brittle or otherwise unusable - A public digital library, providing full view access to the world for public domain content - An access platform, providing traditional library catalog search, full-text search, and other features to all users - A research center, providing a variety of data services for researchers 13, 337, 576 total volumes digitized! What is being digitized? - Collection content is determined by deposits made by partner institutions and the strategic direction from the collections committee. - Books, serials, journals, articles, images, government documents, musical scores, manuscripts and more. - Full-text access and downloading is available for those items in the public domain, including: • US federal government documents • Works published before 1923 • Works still protected by copyright, but made available to Hathi. Trust with the permission of the copyright holder. Hathi. Trust Copyright Policy - All objects in the archive are either in the public domain, have the necessary permissions to support the level of access afforded, or are simply archived in such a way as to ensure an enduring copy of the content. - Hathi. Trust only provides reading access to those publications where permitted by law or by the rights holder. - There are, however, situations where the initial bibliographic determination may be revised from in-copyright to public domain. Orphan Works - Orphan works are books that are subject to copyright but whose copyright holders cannot be identified or contacted - Several libraries partnered with Hathi. Trust started a project in 2011 to digitize and make available orphan works in their collections - Before this, full electronic text of the orphan books have never been shared with users because of concerns about whether copyright law allows such digital access - Project halted a few months later due to lawsuit - Resumed in 2012 Legal Battle Did You Know? • In 2011, the Authors Guild, along with other orgs. and individual parties, sued 5 of the most prominent Hathi. Trust institutions along with Hathi. Trust itself: U. of Michigan, U. of California, U. of Wisconsin, Indiana U. , and Cornell U. Hathi. Trust’s Executive Director from 2008 to 2013 was UIUC’s current Dean of Libraries and University Librarian John P. Wilkin, formerly of the University of Michigan. • Claim: “. . . systemic, concerted, widespread, and unauthorized reproduction and distribution of millions of copyrighted books and other works, including books whose copyrights are held by plaintiffs…” • RESULT, 2012, in favor of Defendants (Hathi. Trust and the 5 university systems): “Judge Harold Baer of the U. S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled all of Hathi. Trust’s endeavors fall under fair use” (Scullen 2015) • Reasoning: for non-profit, educational purposes (doesn’t affect market value of works); “transformative use. . . superior search” (Butler et al. 2012) • Ruling appealed by Plaintiffs in 2014; second ruling same as in 2012 Hathi (pronounced /ha’-tee/) means “elephant” in Hindi and Urdu. The name was chosen because of the elephant’s reputation for good memory and wisdom. Future Implications - Strong precedent for libraries to continue to provide access to both physical and digital holdings - Supports better access to individuals with disabilities, especially blind individuals (supports the American Disabilities Act), since digitized content can be processed via OCR (optical character recognition) -Huge potential for crowdsourcing metadata-rich materials once they are both cataloged and digitized
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