Mass Law Blog

Google Book’s Little Sibling (HathiTrust) OK’d by Second Circuit Under Fair Use

by | Jun 13, 2014

While The Author’s Guild copyright suit against Google Books has received most of the attention on the copyright law front, its smaller sibling – the Author’s copyright suit against HathiTrust – has been proceeding on a parallel track. HathiTrust is a consortium of more than 70 institutions working with Google to digitize the books in their libraries, but a smaller number of books than Google Books (only ten million), and for academic use (including an accommodation for disabled viewers), compared with Google Books’s commercial use.

On June 10, 2014, the Second Circuit upheld the federal district court, holding that HathiTrust is protected from copyright infringement under the fair use doctrine. With respect to full-text search (the most legally problematic aspect of HathiTrust), the Second Circuit held:

  • “[T]he creation of a full‐text searchable database is a quintessentially transformative use” because it serves a “new and different function.”
  • The nature of the copyrighted work (the second factor under fair use analysis) is “of limited usefulness where as here, ‘ the creative work … is being used for a transformative  purpose.’”
  • The copying was not excessive since “it  was reasonably necessary for [HathiTrust] to make use of the entirety of the works  in order to enable the full‐text search function.”
  • And lastly, “full‐text‐search use poses no harm to any existing or potential traditional market” since full-text search “does not serve as a substitute for the books that are being searched.”

Citing HathiTrust’s “extensive security measures,” the court rejected as speculative the Author’s argument that “existence of the digital copies creates the risk of  a security breach which might  impose irreparable damage on the Authors and their works.”*

*note: In an earlier post I discussed the Guild’s argument that Google Books creates the ”all too real risks of hacking, theft and widespread distribution.”  As I noted in that post, in describing that risk the Guild leaves nothing to the imagination: “just one security breach could result in devastating losses to the rightholders of the books Google has subjected to the risk of such a breach by digitizing them and placing them on the Internet.”  In response to similar arguments in HathiTrust the Second Circuit found that there is “no basis in the record on which to conclude that a security breach is likely to occur.”

HathiTrust is distinguishable from Google Books in one significant respect. Non-disabled users can search the HathiTrust database for content, but unlike Google Books, which displays “snippets” of copyrighted works, unless the copyright holder authorizes broader use the results only show page numbers where search terms appear in a given work.

HathiTrust offers additional features to users with disabilities, who can access complete copies if they can show that they are unable to read a work in print. However, the Second Circuit made short shrift of this issue, holding that “the doctrine of fair use allows the Libraries to provide full digital access to copyrighted works to their print-disabled patrons.”

Even taking into consideration the fact that the non-disabled-access HathiTrust library can be distinguished from Google Books on the grounds that it does not provide “snippets,” it is difficult to see how the outcome will be different in the Guild’s appeal of Google Books. The Second Circuit’s central rationales in support of fair use in HathiTrust — that full-text search is transformative and that the database does not serve as a substitute for the books being searched (the latter factor being true in snippet-enabled Google Books as well as in HathiTrust) — likely foretell the fate of the Google Books case* (link), where the federal district court ruled in favor of Google on similar grounds. (For a full discussion of district court decision in the Google Books litigation, click here).

*note: The Author’s Guild suit targeting Google Books is on appeal to the Second Circuit.

Author’s Guild v. Hathitrust, 755 F.3d 87 (2nd Cir. 2014)