On Thursday this week, we filed a brief on behalf over 150 researchers, scholars and educators in Authors Guild v. Google, currently on appeal to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Brief of Digital Humanities and Legal Scholars argues that Copyright law is not, and should not be, an obstacle to the computational analysis of text. Copyright law has long recognized the distinction between protecting an author’s original expression and the public’s right to access the facts and ideas contained within that expression.
We are confident that the Second Circuit will vote to maintain that distinction in the digital age so that library digitization, internet search and related non-expressive uses of written works remain legal.
The final version of the brief is available on the free online repository ssrn.com at this link address: http://ssrn.com/abstract=
We are grateful for the support of so many wonderful scholars in this important case and we are even more grateful for all the fascinating research that these computer scientists, english professors, historians, linguists, and all those working in the digital humanities do to enrich our lives.
We would also like to thank The Association for Computers and the Humanities and the Canadian Society of Digital Humanities/Société canadienne des humanités numériques for their support as institutions.
Matthew Jockers
Matthew Sag
Jason Schultz