Have you made use of HathiTrust or Google’s full text search of books? Unlike full text searching of public domain collections, HathiTrust and Google’s search function includes the text of in-copyright works as well. This function enables researchers to more easily find information within text resources, examine word usage through time, and perform other text analysis.
This search function is only available to us because of fair use. Fair use is an exception in copyright law that describes how certain uses of copyrighted material are not an infringement of an author’s copyright, for example in scholarship, critique, and news reporting. In The Author’s Guild v. Hathitrust and Authors Guild v. Google, Inc., the digitizing of in-copyright books to create a searchable database that provided only snippets of text surrounding the searched word was found to be a fair use. If the search function at issue had not been found a fair use, the powerful tools of in-text search across 95+ years of publications would be limited or non-existent. These cases and others are just examples of how fair use, a powerful exception in copyright law, can help us use the past to create the future.
Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week, February 26th-March 1st, 2024, is a celebration of this exception in copyright law. Every year, fairuseweek.org provides a central location where libraries, museums, and related institutions can share the events and programming that they have planned as a celebration of fair use. Check out the events for 2024.