text: It is also an example predicated on copyright’s limitations and exceptions — in this case, on 
  U.S. fair use. While the Authors Guild ﬁled a copyright infringement suit against HathiTrust, 
  federal courts in 2012 and 2014 ruled that HathiTrust’s use of books was fair use.   32 
  
  A nonproﬁt founded in 2008, HathiTrust grew out of a partnership among major US university 
  libraries and today is “an international community of research libraries committed to the 
  long-term curation and availability of the cultural record.” 
   It started in what it calls the “early 
  days of mass digitization” — that is, at a time when it started to become economical to take 
  existing physical artifacts in libraries and turn them into digital ﬁles at a large scale. 
  
  33 
  
  The founding members of HathiTrust were among the initial partners for Google’s Book 
  Search product, which allows people to search across and view small snippets of text from 
  in-copyright books and read full copies of public domain books scanned from libraries’ 
  collections. The libraries provided Google with books from their collections, Google would 
  then scan the books for use in Book Search, and return to the libraries a digital copy for their 
  own uses. These uses included setting up HathiTrust not only to ensure long-term 
  preservation of the digital books and their metadata, but also to facilitate other uses, 
  including full text search of books and accessibility for people with print disabilities. In 
  separate court cases, both Google and HathiTrust’s uses of the books were deemed 
  consistent with copyright law. 
  
  34 