Court Holds that Associations do not have Standing to Bring Copyright Suits in their Name on Behalf of their Members

On October 10th, in Authors Guild Inc. v. HathiTrust, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York held that, under the Copyright Act, associations do not have standing to bring copyright infringement actions on behalf of their members. The court did say that because the U.S. constitution does not prevent associations from bringing suit, foreign associations might have standing, if such standing is provided for under their home countries’ copyright laws. The case involves a lawsuit between various authors and university libraries over the mass digitizing the authors’ copyrighted works through the Google Book Search program. Under this program, Google made arrangements with several of the world’s largest libraries to digitize the entire contents of their collections to create an online searchable database, and to provide the libraries with copies of the digitized versions of their collections. In 2011, a group of libraries that participated in this program established a new service, called the HathiTrust digital library, to which the libraries would contribute their digitized collections. According to HathiTrust, this database of copies is to be made available for full-text searching and preservation activities. It is also intended to offer free access to works to individuals who have “print disabilities.” For works under copyright protection, the search function would return only a list of page numbers that a search term appears on and the frequency of such appearance. The suit was brought by The Authors Guild and several other parties (including many foreign authors associations and several individual authors) against the HathiTrust, as well as the participating universities (the University of Michigan, the University of California, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, and Cornell University).

In addition to addressing the associational standing issue the court also denied the Plaintiff author associations’ motion to prevent the HathiTrust from asserting a defense of fair use. The Plaintiffs argued that Section 108 of the Copyright Act, which allows libraries to make limited copies of certain works for specified purposes, precluded libraries from arguing that their activities constituted fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act. However, the court held “Section 108 provides rights to libraries in addition to fair-use rights that might be available.” The court then considered the four fair use factors and determined that the uses of digitized works pursuant to the HathiTrust book digitization project might constitute fair use and therefore Defendants fair use defense should not be dismissed. The decision in this case should not be confused with the pending copyright infringement case between the Authors Guild against Google.

Other IP News

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FBI in DC Creates Intellectual Property Squad (ABC News)
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