Related statement from Paul Courant, university librarian and dean of libraries
“This is a misguided and unnecessary lawsuit.
“We’ve spent nearly 200 years as a library, serving the public good by preserving our collections and providing access to them to scholars, students, authors and citizens. For two centuries, we have done that lawfully — and that is true today. We buy books, keep them, care for them, rebind them, and take myriad steps to assure that the scholarly and cultural record are available to our academic community and to the world.
“The University of Michigan library has been digitizing books for more than 20 years Sections 108 and 107 of the federal Copyright Act provide the guidance and the authority for this work, which supports our ability to preserve and to lawfully use the collections that we have purchased and maintained. Moreover, our digitization efforts enable us to make works accessible to people who have print disabilities because the overwhelming majority of works have never been available in an accessible format.
“As a research university, we are a community of authors, and we have deep respect for copyright law and for the rights and interests of authors. Our digitization efforts simply reflect the library’s continuing legacy of prudence in curating the world’s scholarly and cultural record.
“Until the complaint, we had been engaged in what we thought was civil discourse with the Authors Guild (and other parties) about the Orphan Works Project. We had hoped that they would bring their resources to bear to aid us in locating copyright holders — which remains the primary goal of the project — in order to reduce the number of potential orphan works.
“We are disappointed by the Guild’s actions and words, but remain confident that are own actions are not only lawful, but also ethical and indeed even noble.”
University Librarian and Dean of Libraries Paul Courant says he was disappointed by what he called a “misguided and unnecessary” lawsuit filed this week by the Authors Guild and others seeking to stop digitization efforts of copyrighted material at the U-M Libraries.
The U-M, HathiTrust, and four other university partners were sued over alleged copyright infringement of digitized books. In the lawsuit, the Authors Guild and authors groups from Canada and Australia, demand that digitization efforts of copyrighted material stop and that digital versions be impounded and no longer made available.
“As a research university, we are a community of authors, and we have deep respect for copyright law and for the rights and interests of authors,” Courant says. “Our digitization efforts simply reflect the library’s continuing legacy of prudence in curating the world’s scholarly and cultural record.”
Digital versions of the university’s books primarily are used for preservation purposes, but also for providing access to people who have print disabilities, as a finding tool for the library’s works, and for scholarly research.
The lawsuit also seeks to halt the university’s nascent Orphan Works pilot project. An “orphan” work is a work for which the rights holder cannot be identified and the book itself no longer is available for purchase new, or is “out of print.”
The university currently is searching for rights holders of books that likely may be orphan works. The goal of the project is to allow students, faculty and staff at the university to view books that the university owns, and to download one page at a time, similar to taking the book off the shelf and making a copy at a copy machine.
The university is reviewing the legal documents and will respond to the complaint.
