national federation of the blind has filed to seek status as defendants in AG v HathiTrust
The National Federation of the Blind has filed to intervene in the AG v HathiTrust case as /defendants/ because the AG's request to have the entire library taken down would contravene the visually impaired rights of access to this information under ADA, and impinge on their Fair Use of the materials. These materials are otherwise unavailable for access because publishers have not typically pursued facilitating access to their published works by the visually impaired and other communities whose rights of access are protected under law. http://laboratorium.net/archive/2011/12/12/gbs_related_cases
http://thepublicindex.org/docs/cases/hathitrust/25-memorandum-in-support.pdf
(oddly the PDF does not have a text layer!) "By seeking to impound all of the digital copies of the works in the HathiTrust Digital Library and to prevent all future digitization of copyrighted works by the Defendants, the Plaintiffs threaten (1) to deny the Proposed Intervenors their legal right to access texts in the Defendants' collections and (2) to interfere with the Defendants' rights to facilitate that access under Sections 107 and 121 of the Copyright Act. ... "Since its inception, one of HathiTrust's core objectives has been to provide access to its collection digitally to persons with print disabilities. ... By contrast, through the history of the printed word, publishers and authors have, overwhelmingly, not made their publications available in formats that are accessible to the blind ... which means that the efforts of universities to provide access to millions of works to blind people through the HathiTrust is the single largest endeavor in history to make print materials accessible to the blind. ... "... Through the HathiTrust Digital Library, blind members of these university community would have the opportunity to access more than nine million works, rather than being largely restricted to the tiny body of books that have been printed in braille or digitized piece-meal for use by the blind. "The availability of such an enormous collection could revolutionize how the blind learn on college campuses and offer, for the first time, equal access to information."
http://thepublicindex.org/docs/cases/hathitrust/25-memorandum-in-support.pdf
(oddly the PDF does not have a text layer!) "By seeking to impound all of the digital copies of the works in the HathiTrust Digital Library and to prevent all future digitization of copyrighted works by the Defendants, the Plaintiffs threaten (1) to deny the Proposed Intervenors their legal right to access texts in the Defendants' collections and (2) to interfere with the Defendants' rights to facilitate that access under Sections 107 and 121 of the Copyright Act. ... "Since its inception, one of HathiTrust's core objectives has been to provide access to its collection digitally to persons with print disabilities. ... By contrast, through the history of the printed word, publishers and authors have, overwhelmingly, not made their publications available in formats that are accessible to the blind ... which means that the efforts of universities to provide access to millions of works to blind people through the HathiTrust is the single largest endeavor in history to make print materials accessible to the blind. ... "... Through the HathiTrust Digital Library, blind members of these university community would have the opportunity to access more than nine million works, rather than being largely restricted to the tiny body of books that have been printed in braille or digitized piece-meal for use by the blind. "The availability of such an enormous collection could revolutionize how the blind learn on college campuses and offer, for the first time, equal access to information."
