Are You Kidding? | Editorial
My response to the latest Authors Guild suit Oct 1, 2011AUTHORS AND LIBRARIANS USED TO GET ALONG— and many still do. Every author I’ve heard speaking to a crowd of librarians tells fond stories about the childhood librarian who saved them and the worlds of possibility the local library opened up to them. They laud librarians for being the first to take up their book and for giving it both a push to library users and a home long past its bookstore shelf life. They organize to raise money for libraries, like Karin Slaughter and others.
In the digital world, however, the relationship is not so simple. Last February, Scott Turow wrote an impassioned piece on the Huffington Post, decrying the disproportionate budget cuts to public libraries. Now, Turow, president of the Authors Guild, is leading the latest salvo against libraries.
On September 12, that organization, whose members are largely trade, not scholarly, book authors, filed suit against the HathiTrust, a digital archive borne out of collaboration among a handful of research universities to preserve and curate books in their libraries. Since its establishment in 2008, HathiTrust has expanded its repository, benefiting in part from the book scanning that many of these universities participated in with Google. The suit also names the University of Michigan (UM), a founding partner that hosts HathiTrust infrastructure, and Cornell, Indiana University, the University of California, and the University of Wisconsin.
The suit seeks to prevent the HathiTrust from “reproducing, distributing, and/or displaying copyrighted works,” alleging massive copyright infringement and calling into question libraries’ fair use rights. But these have not been violated by HathiTrust, despite its moves in the past several months to make its collection more widely available for full-text searching through a series of agreements with discovery services like WorldCat (OCLC), EDS (EBSCO), and Summon (Serials Solutions). Ultimately, that will also make these digitized titles available to students and faculty, if they are held by a university or if the university or library has an agreement with a provider for the licensed work, again meeting legal strictures.
HathiTrust has also made an effort to solve one of the knottier problems left from the now-defunct Google book scan project, the identification of “orphan” works, those for which no copyright owner has been found, estimated by publishing consultant Michael Cairns at over half a million in-copyright titles. UM also jump-started that effort. The HathiTrust has been judicious, however, about potentially freeing up such works for distribution; its orphan works candidate list numbers under 200. (In the wake of the suit, UM has put its orphan works project on hold to examine its procedures.)
This all this sounds pretty evil to the Authors Guild.
The reaction has been strong. The suit “borders on the frivolous,” says library community advocate and intellectual property lawyer Jonathan Band, and it has been called “shortsighted and ill-conceived” by the Library Copyright Alliance (LCA), which comprises the American Library Association, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Association of College & Research Libraries. LJ Academic Newswire columnist Barbara Fister (an author as well as a librarian) dubbed it “overwrought and petty” in her September 15 column.
It’s also a subversion of copyright law, which protects library fair use. Despite the extensions of copyright protection over the past couple of decades, copyright was never meant to protect authors or inventors indefinitely. Instead, as Fister reminds us, it aims to promote the public good, “the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” “What is more troubling to me,” she says, “is...that copyright is being read as a one-sided right: for authors...as a moral right, not as a balance of interests recognized by law.”
It’s rather ironic that Turow, a library advocate, is leading the charge against libraries. As the LCA notes in its statement deploring the suit, Turow seems to have forgotten what he wrote earlier this year on the Huffington Post: “Widespread public access to knowledge, like public education, is one of the pillars of our democracy, a guarantee that we can maintain a well-informed citizenry.... Most important of all, perhaps, a library within a community stands as a testimonial to its values....” Respect for the Founders’ intentions on copyright and the provisions for fair use for libraries should be among those values.
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| Francine Fialkoff (ffialkoff@mediasourceinc.com) is Editor-in-Chief, LJ |
