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This overview of copyright law and the application of fair use discusses the deciding factors as they apply to different types of copyrighted work.

Creative Commons is a website, or tool, that you can use to create your our copyright restrictions. Instead of have a traditional blanket copyright, creative commons allows publishers/creators personalize the copyright and protection of their material. For example, a person who uses Creative Commons to set up restrictions for their photographs can allow other the repost and cite his photos. However, it restricts companies from using it in ads (like on facebook).

This article is an early announcement of the Authors Guild's lawsuit against the HathiTrust Digital Library. It explains the accusations of copyright infringement from the Authors Guild, who seek the complete halt of the HathiTrust's reproduction and distribution of digitized works, not limited to the Orphan Works project.

Matthew Ingram discusses the recent ruling on the Author's Guild's copyright infringement lawsuit. The author points out the decisive nature of the ruling, and goes on to explain the reasons that the project clearly falls under the protection of fair use. He argues that this ruling follows the intent of copyright law, to promote research and knowledge.

This news article posted by Newsroom America outlines the quiet victory for librarians that occurred pertaining to copyright laws. This event has been described as a major victory for the digital humanities. Earlier in October 2012, a federal court ruled against the Authors Guild in favor of the HathiTrust, a massive digital archive of library materials converted from print that is co-owned and managed by a partnership of more than 60 academic institutions, including the University of Illinois. Publishers Weekly claimed this ruling as a "landmark in copyright" law.

This is article on the HathiTrust verdict explains the extent to which the verdict will affect the use of digitized materials in university libraries. The verdict held that digitizing works for the purpose of providing access to the blind and print-disabled is not only fair, but transformative use. This will allows universities to not only maintain digitized texts for this audience, but to share them among each other, reducing wait times for materials from months to minutes.

Another early announcement of the HathiTrust's Orphan Works initiative, this article discusses the pros and cons of the project, and the potential changes that it may bring. The author speculates on possible benefits while pointing to the important decisions that will have to be made regarding copyrights.

This statement from the Authors Guild explains their disagreement with the ruling in favor of the HathiTrust Digital Library. Accusing the project of carelessness in searching for the copyright-holders of "orphan works," the article expresses disappointment in the lack of action taken by the courts.

The HathiTrust Digital Library is a partnership of research institutions and libraries working to securely preserve historical collections to be accesible long into the future. These collections are open access, and include a wide spectrum of cultures across a variety of different time periods. The partnership has been recently engaged in legal disputes regarding alleged copyright infringement in their Orphan Works Project. In addition to basic access to many of the collections, the HDL offers search functions within the documents that allow for new uses of the texts, such as text mining.

This program is used by the HathiTrust Digital Library to seek out "orphan works" that have no apparent benefactors, and make them available to the general public. This project's noble purposes have been called into question by organizations like the Authors Guild, who argue that it often fails to find those who are due compensation.

This editorial takes a more personal view of the HathiTrust verdict, and its application to the blind and print-disabled. The author gives personal accounts of genius he has witnessed in this community, explaining his excitement that they will now have access to millions of works rather than small collections.

This article helps to give a general overview of the current state of fair use, specifically with regards to the HathiTrust project. The author is hopeful, giving the project's Orphan Works undertaking more credit than the Authors Guild. He argues that the meticulous nature of the work being done is promising, and may lead to solutions to the many and various problems raised by the public domain.

This article reports on the ruling by Harold Baer, Jr. which held that the HathiTrust's mass digitization is fair use. The judge explained in his opinion that the HDL's project is not only fair use in and of itself, but that its potential for text mining and the facilitation of access for print-disabled persons are transformative in nature, and can serve an entirely different purpose than the original works.

This article gives a brief overview of the environment surrounding the HathiTrust litigation, and gives some added insight to the cases in which Google has been involved. It specifically notes Google's exclusion from the Orphan Works project, citing Judge Denny Chin's assertion that private parties should not be allowed to "establish a mechanism for exploiting unclaimed books.

This article presents the Orphan Works project near its inception. It identifies the nature of the problem to be the sheer size of the project's scope, which claims about 73% of the HathiTrust's collection to be eligible for fair use as soon as they are proven to be orphan works.

This digital archive is an archive that allows for content to be open for global access. The content consists of digitized texts, in many languages, and other multimedia material. The material on this site is used in respect to copyrights and the content owners and contributers agreements.

Beginning in 1971, Project Gutenberg is the first online catalog of electronic books. Claiming to be the largest collection online, Project Gutenberg aims to digitize all books and allow them to be organized and searched through their site. The website can be viewed in multiple languages and allows people to volunteer and donate for the continuation of this project. The site only uses books whose copyright has expired, which makes them free in the United States, and they are allowed to be downloaded and redistributed.

With the advancement of Digital Humanities and the ability to digitize text, this article talks about Brewster Kahle, the creator of Internet Archive and the home to thousands of books, journals, media, etc. Claiming to be a digital librarian, Internet Archive is an online database, much like Wayback Machine, where users can access out-of-print and out-of-copyrighted works. Kahle believes it is important to digitize these texts because one day they may not be available to the public anymore.

This article explains the dispute between Google and publishers here in the United States. As we have seen in class, Google Books offers internet users the ability to search through their database of scanned books. Publishers are fighting that Google is violating copyright laws by scanning these books and letting people have free open access. Although the project itself is causing an uproar, publishers as well as authors are being given the opportunity to decide what books are included in this project.

This article explains how Google Books is teaming with digital humanities scholars to spread digital sharing for public use. The company announced they will bankroll 12 university based research projects. Google has been scanning books since 2004, accumulating to over 12 million books. One of the projects Google is supporting is called "Reframing the Victorians," which plans to find out if the Victorian era had an optimistic population by crowdsourcing materials. Google has decided to use one million to support digital humanities in the next two years.