The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) will host a webcast on October 24, 2012, from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. ET, to discuss the Authors Guild v. HathiTrust decision and the implications of this victory for research libraries.
The webcast will be moderated by Brandon Butler, Director of Public Policy Initiatives at ARL, and will feature discussion from Jonathan Band, of policybandwidth, an expert in copyright law and the co-author of the Library Copyright Alliance amicus brief in the HathiTrust case; Peter Jaszi, Professor of Law at American University's Washington College of Law, as well as co-facilitator of the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Academic and Research Libraries and a member of the legal team that represented the National Federation of the Blind; Dan Goldstein, a partner at Brown, Goldstein & Levy; and Jason M. Schultz, Assistant Clinical Professor of Law and Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at the University of California Berkeley School of Law.
On October 10, 2012, Judge Harold Baer handed down a landmark fair use decision in the Authors Guild v. HathiTrust case. The HathiTrust was created by university libraries as a collective storehouse for digitized works from their collections, including millions of volumes digitized in partnership with Google. In 2011, the Authors Guild sued the HathiTrust and several ARL member institutions claiming that they committed copyright infringement on a massive scale by using these digital scans for preservation, to power a search tool, and to provide accessible versions of books for print disabled patrons. The NFB intervened in the case to defend the accessibility aspect of the project. The Library Copyright Alliance filed an amicus brief on behalf of libraries, and a group of digital humanities scholars filed a brief in support of the search functionality enabled by the HathiTrust database.
An archive of the webcast will be made available on ARL's YouTube channel after the event. To register for the webcast, interested parties may visit http://www.visualwebcaster.com/event.asp?id=90208.
