Kevin Smith, “The quest for ‘super-property,’” Scholarly Communications @ Duke

Pull quote: “Publishers were seeking a ‘new deal,’ a super-property right that is unprecedented in any other market place. And what libraries ‘won’ (remembering that no library was a party to the case) was simply the right to proceed as we have been for many years. I have no doubt that if the lower courts had been upheld in this case, publishers would begin to demand ‘public lending fees’ from libraries whenever a book was printed in another country, and would have moved operations offshore to increase the situations in which they could demand such a fee (as the Second Circuit Court of Appeals acknowledged was a likely outcome). It is an overstatement to call this a victory for libraries; it was merely a successful defense of what we have done for many years, which, it turns out, is something that our courts really value and appreciate.”

Kevin Smith, “The quest for ‘super-property,’” Scholarly Communications @ Duke

Nancy Sims, “What is the government’s interest in copyright? Not that of the public,” Copyright Librarian

Pull quote: “For the government to even consider intervening in this case signals (incredibly much more intensely than I have thought in my most cynical moments) that they do not think there are any valid interests in copyright other than that of business entities engaging in commercial, market activities.”

Nancy Sims, “What is the government’s interest in copyright? Not that of the public,” Copyright Librarian

Scott Jaschik, “Library supporters worry U.S. may back publishers in copyright case,” Inside Higher Ed

Pull quote: “Jonathan Band, a Washington lawyer who is an expert on copyright law, said via e-mail that his ‘suspicion is that the Copyright Office has asked DOJ to file an amicus brief in support of the publishers. Hopefully other agencies, e.g., the Department of Education, will weigh in and advise the DOJ that supporting the publishers would be a bad idea from a political, public policy, and substantive legal point of view.’”

Scott Jaschik, “Library supporters worry U.S. may back publishers in copyright case,” Inside Higher Ed

Meredith Schwartz, “HathiTrust Verdict Could Transform University Access for the Blind,” Library Journal

Pull quote: “Now that the HathiTrust verdict has held that digitizing works for the purpose of providing access to the blind and print-disabled is not only a fair but a transformative use, schools can feel safer hanging onto those scans until the next student who needs them comes along, and can spend their efforts on improving them or scanning more books, instead of doing the same bare minimum of texts over and over.”

Meredith Schwartz, “HathiTrust Verdict Could Transform University Access for the Blind,” Library Journal

Karen Coyle, “Copyright Victories, Part II,’ Coyle’s InFormation

Pull quote about recent Hathi Trust decision: “Not mentioned anywhere that I can find is the question of digital ‘photographs’ of pages vs. OCR’d text. The suit and the decision blend these together as ‘a digital copy.’ Having seen some of the results of Google’s digitization I can say that the text resulting from the OCR can be quite lossy depending on the page layout (tables of contents in particular come out quite badly) and the quality of the original book. It is also the ‘transformation’ part of the copying, since the photographs of the pages are simply copies of the page and are by their nature human-readable substitutes for the page itself. The judge seems to consider these ‘transitory’ but in fact they are quite solidly real, and are stored in the HathiTrust repository. I suspect it is these pictures of the pages that the Authors Guild fears will be pirated should HathiTrust be hacked, less so the OCR’d pages which are unattractive plain text. However, HathiTrust was able to show the judge that it takes security quite seriously, and the Authors Guild was unable to demonstrate any quantifiable risk.”

Karen Coyle, “Copyright Victories, Part II,’ Coyle’s InFormation

Kevin Smith, “The six million dollar fair use standard,” Scholarly Communications @ Duke

Pull quote: “We can no longer preserve the illusion that all this was about was to provide some certainty about fair use for digital course content. The publishers spent 6 million and now could walk away with a workable, if unpopular, standard. Instead the battle against universities and higher education will continue. How sad.”

Kevin Smith, “The six million dollar fair use standard,” Scholarly Communications @ Duke

Zick Rubin, “Let’s Spread the Word About Fair Use,” Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Pull quote: “After a two-week trial in Atlanta, Judge Evans ruled that Georgia State had the right to make available to enrolled students up to one chapter of a 10-chapter book without permission or payment, as a matter of fair use. That’s because the constitutionally prescribed purpose of copyright is not to enrich authors or publishers but rather to encourage the progress of knowledge.”

Zick Rubin, “Let’s Spread the Word About Fair Use,” Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Kevin Smith, “A not-very-appealing appeal,” Scholarly Communications @ Duke

Pull quote: “This is not about protecting authors; it is, as it always has been, a marketing ploy, especially for the CCC, that aims to compel libraries to give an even larger share of their budgets to these publishers, and the groups that are financing them, without getting any new scholarship for that money.”

Kevin Smith, “A not-very-appealing appeal,” Scholarly Communications @ Duke

Academics Object to Class Certification in Google Books Case

Pull quote: “’Academic authors, almost by definition, are committed to maximizing access to knowledge. The [Authors] Guild and the [Association of American Publishers], by contrast, are institutionally committed to maximizing profits.’”

Academics Object to Class Certification in Google Books Case

ReDigi and the Purpose of First Sale

Pull quote: “What I love about this case is that it pushes and pulls our intuitions about copyright in so many different directions. It brings up fundamental questions not just about unsettled corners of doctrine, but also about what copyright is for. It offers grist for every mill, food for every kind of thought.”

ReDigi and the Purpose of First Sale