"Brief of Digital Humanities and Law Scholars as Amici Curiae in Authors Guild v. Google"

Matthew L. Jockers, Matthew Sag, and Jason Schultz have self-archived "Brief of Digital Humanities and Law Scholars as Amici Curiae in Authors Guild v. Google" in SSRN.

Here's an excerpt:

The brief argues that, just as copyright law has long recognized the distinction between protection for an author's original expression (e.g., the narrative prose describing the plot) and the public's right to access the facts and ideas contained within that expression (e.g., a list of characters or the places they visit), the law must also recognize the distinction between copying books for expressive purposes (e.g., reading) and nonexpressive purposes, such as extracting metadata and conducting macroanalyses. We amici urge the court to follow established precedent with respect to Internet search engines, software reverse engineering, and plagiarism detection software and to hold that the digitization of books for text-mining purposes is a form of incidental or intermediate copying to be regarded as fair use as long as the end product is also nonexpressive or otherwise non-infringing.

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