Digitized Books for Disabled Don’t Need Authors’ OK
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A group of university libraries can make digitized books available for use to the disabled, and for word searches, without permission from the authors, an appeals court ruled.
The U.S. Court of Appeals in New York today agreed with a lower court that the group, the HathiTrust Digital Library, which has copied more than 10 million works since 2004, was engaging in a “fair use” of the copyrighted works. The ruling is a loss for the 20 copyright-holders and authors’ groups that sued in 2011, claiming the HathiTrust project infringed copyrights.