“Libraries are not leaving the future of digital books to Google,” the HathiTrust partnership said in a prepared statement March 23. The statement came the day after U.S. Appeals Court Judge Denny Chin rejected (PDF file) the Google Books Settlement following some seven years of litigation and out-of-court talks with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers.
HathiTrust, a three-year-old international digital repository maintained by 52 academic and research libraries, added that it “will maintain our commitment to long-term digital preservation of library collections curated by generations of librarians at great research libraries around the world.” That mission-oriented statement echoes sentiments expressed by Paul Courant, university librarian and dean of libraries at the University of Michigan where HathiTrust is housed and one of the five prestigious libraries with which Google launched a mass digitization project at the end of 2004, along with Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford universities and New York Public Library. “Notwithstanding the decision,” Courant stated, “Google continues to scan our books and we continue to use the scanned works for preservation, indexing and search, linguistic research, and to meet the needs of those with print disabilities.”
Courant went on to express hope that the outcome “will finally spur Congress to make real progress toward orphan works legislation,” referring to Judge Chin’s rejection of the settlement’s opt-out system that treats abandoned titles still under copyright protection as if they were in the public domain unless someone claims ownership and withdraws the title from Google’s digitized collection.
In his decision Chin wrote, “While the digitization of books and the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many, the [Amended Settlement Agreement] would simply go too far. It would permit this class action—which was brought against defendant Google Inc. to challenge its scanning of books and display of ‘snippets’ for on-line searching—to implement a forward-looking business arrangement that would grant Google significant rights to exploit entire books, without permission of the copyright owners. Indeed, the ASA would give Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission, while releasing claims well beyond those presented in the case.”
“The decision does not dim our hope that a path can be found for public access to out-of-print works,” the University of California Libraries said in a prepared statement March 23. “In the meantime, a searchable corpus of the digitized collections held securely by the UC Libraries and other major research libraries across the country obtained in large measure through the Google partnership is available to users today via the HathiTrust.” Of the 8.4 million digitized copies held by HathiTrust, 2.2 million that in the public domain have been made available online. Another promising initiative, still on the drawing board, is the formation of a Digital Public Library of America.
None of the libraries that partnered with Google in the United States and elsewhere will be able to offer access to the digitized copies of the titles in their holdings until these copyright issues have been resolved. However, the HathiTrust and Serials Solutions announced March 28 a remarkable workaround; beginning this summer, institutions subscribing to the Summon web-scale discovery service will be able to offer researchers and faculty full-text search of the entire HathiTrust collection of digitized scholarly books through the library’s website for materials relevant to their research topics.
Although Google has not yet indicated its next move, Courant said the search-engine giant has “affirmed that it will continue to scan works from our library and other partner libraries.” Unsurprisingly, speculation has run rampant through the biblioblogosphere: Theories range from a modified settlement, in which copyrighted works can only be added by an opt-in from their rights holders, to the formation of a coalition that will push for definitive orphan-works legislation.
“We would put our weight behind that,” said HathiTrust Executive Director John Wilkin of the latter possibility. He told the March 23 Chronicle of Higher Education that the trust has been “trying to get some bibliographic certainty” of just how many titles may be orphan works.
The last time an Orphan Works Bill was considered was in 2008. The House and Senate versions were never reconciled despite strong support for the Senate version from the American Library Association and the Association of Research Libraries.
