POST: Operationalizing “Non-Consumptive” Fair Use to Revolutionize Humanities Research

Brandon Butler (University of Virginia Library) has written a post for the Perspectives from HathiTrust blog to discuss a new policy on non-consumptive use from the HathiTrust Research Center. In “Operationalizing ‘Non-Consumptive’ Fair Use to Revolutionize Humanities Research,” Butler explains the key elements of fair use law that form the basis of the policy, noting that the policy is also intended to serve as a reference for other institutions in developing computational access to copyrighted materials.

Perhaps the most exciting thing about the new policy is that it represents the generalization of the principle favoring web search so that it favors all computer analysis of any text for an open-ended variety of research purposes. Judge Leval’s opinion, together with the opinion in the HathiTrust case, laid out the broad principles favoring this generalization, but this policy may well be the first attempt to really move beyond search to cover the full range of research projects that might benefit from non-consumptive methods.