Legal victory for university consortium that includes UC

Inside Higher Ed is reporting a legal victory concerning a Google/university partnership that involves indexing a vast number of books.  Excerpt:

Much of the work of the HathiTrust (a consortium of universities) to make books in university collections more easily searchable and accessible to people with disabilities is protected by “fair use” and is not subject to a copyright suit brought by authors’ groups, a federal judge has ruled…

I can’t give you the ins and outs of this case but UC is a member of the HathiTrust.  The full Inside Higher Ed article is at:

http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/10/11/fair-use-applies-book-digitizing-work-judge-rules

That article links to a legal blog which contains the following interesting passage:

…(T)his opinion together with the Georgia State e-reserve opinion and the UCLA streaming-video opinion strike me as a real trend—universities making internal technological uses of copyrighted works are doing quite well in court of late. Something significant in judicial attitudes towards copyright, computers, and education has clicked into place of late…

See http://laboratorium.net/archive/2012/10/10/hathitrust_wins

If any legal experts have insights as to the significance of this case or other related cases, please add them in the comment option to this posting.  In the UCLA case, some video owners sought to prevent classes at UCLA from using streaming videos as part of course websites.  There was a brief suspension of such videos which disrupted some courses but the university decided the claim was invalid and allowed the streaming while further litigation occurred.