Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
The law forum I posted a link to in post #67 above is of the opinion that book scanning is illegal in the US, but I guess that it will remain merely an opinion until a case is brought to court.
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I read all of the posts on that thread, and the poster (quincy) who is saying that it is illegal is basing his opinion (in part) on the cases of Authors Guild v HathiTrust and Authors Guild v Google. Unfortunately, in both of those cases, the ultimate ruling was in favor of the defendants, and therefore in favor of scanning books being "fair use". (See
https://www.eff.org/document/authors...ppeal-decision and
https://www.eff.org/document/opinion...gment-fair-use )
There's also the issue (in my opinion) that neither the HathiTrust case nor the Google case have anything at ALL to do with format shifting by an individual of materials that the individual owns. Both of the cases quincy cites are about companies scanning books and making the scans (or portions of the scans) available to the public in some way. So...even if those cases had been won by the Author's Guild, and the scanning was ruled to be infringement, they would still have no bearing on a case of an individual scanning books that he or she owns.
Shari