Appeals Court Finds Scanning To Be Fair Use 34
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.
Knowledge (Score:5, Interesting)
"The field of knowledge is the common property of mankind."
--- Thomas Jefferson (Letter to Henry Dearborn, 1807)
Re:What good is a scanned book if you can't get it (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... [wordpress.com] 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.