Breana McCrackenUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

HathiTrust and Copyright

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

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 HathiTrust with the permission of the copyright holder

.

What is HathiTrust? - 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 long-term 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!

Copyright Issues

HathiTrust 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.

-  HathiTrust 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 HathiTrust 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

• In 2011, the Authors Guild, along with other orgs. and individual parties, sued 5 of the most prominent HathiTrust institutions along with HathiTrust itself: U. of Michigan,  U. of California, U. of Wisconsin, Indiana U., and Cornell U.

• 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  (HathiTrust and the 5 university systems):  “Judge Harold Baer of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled all of HathiTrust’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

Did You Know?

HathiTrust’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.

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.