Disability Law: Setting a Precedent - Authors Guild vs HathiTrust
District Judge Harold Baer Jr. declared that the HathiTrust’s scanning and use of copyrighted works counted as fair use under copyright law. In a summary judgment, he threw out the Authors Guild’s arguments that HathiTrust and its partners had trampled copyright law by scanning millions of works, and held that providing access for students with print disabilities constitutes a “transformative use” under the fair use provision of the Copyright Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act.