Universities are and have always been vast copy machines. Evolved from medieval monasteries and their vast libraries and scriptoria, universities have always had as central functions of their mission the copying, transforming, and preserving works of art, thought, and science and making them available to their patrons.
More recently, universities have found cause to make copies of books, articles, films, photographs, maps, and other materials in forms easily accessible to students through electronic reserves or course-management systems. In one of the most exciting recent copying projects, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor has led a consortium called HathiTrust Digital Library that includes Cornell and Indiana Universities and the Universities of California, and Wisconsin at Madison. The consortium provides a vast online catalog of works scanned via Google Books, with full-text search capabilities. Most important, it allows sight-impaired readers to access and search the entire text of millions of works.
On Wednesday a federal judge ruled in favor of the trust and its university partners in a copyright-infringement lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild and other groups. In his ruling, the judge said that the trust’s handling of the scanned works falls “safely within the provision of fair use.” And, he wrote: “I cannot imagine a definition of fair use that would not encompass the transformative uses made” by the project.