HathiTrust was founded in October 2008 by the twelve universities of the
Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the eleven libraries of the
University of California. As of 2024, members include more than 219 research libraries across the United States, Canada, and Europe, and is based on a
shared governance structure. Costs are shared by the participating libraries and library consortia. The repository is administered by the
University of Michigan. The executive director of HathiTrust is Mike Furlough, who succeeded founding director
John Wilkin after Wilkin stepped down in 2013. The HathiTrust Shared Print Program is a distributed
collective collection whose participating libraries have committed to retaining almost 18 million
monograph volumes for 25 years, representing three-quarters of HathiTrust digital book holdings. In September 2011, the
Authors Guild sued HathiTrust (
Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust), alleging massive copyright violation. A
federal court ruled against the Authors Guild in October 2012, finding that HathiTrust's use of
books scanned by Google was
fair use under US law. The court's opinion relied on the
transformativeness doctrine of federal copyright law, holding that HathiTrust had transformed the copyrighted works without infringing on the copyright holders' rights. That decision was largely affirmed by the
Second Circuit on June 10, 2014, which found that providing search and
accessibility for the
visually impaired were grounds to consider the service transformative and fair use, and remanded to the lower court to reconsider whether the plaintiffs had
standing to sue regarding HathiTrust's library preservation copies. In September 2024, HathiTrust comprised more than 18 million volumes, including 6.7 million in the
public domain in the United States. HathiTrust provides a number of discovery and access services, notably,
full-text search across the entire repository. As of 2021, the copyright policy states that "many works in our collection are protected by copyright law, so we cannot ordinarily publicly display large portions of those protected works unless we have permission from the copyright holder", and thus "if we cannot determine the copyright or permission status of a work, we restrict access to that work until we can establish its status. Because of differences in international copyright laws, access is also restricted for users outside the United States to works published outside the United States after and including 1896." ==PageTurner==