The article distributed in class published in "The Chronicle" addresses the copyright law dealing with placing digital copies of text online. The lawsuit against HathiTrust, among many other universities, sought to take the digital repositories from them in that they could not be distributed online. It asks them to impound and lock up all unauthorized copies of copyright protected works.
In a sense, I see where the lawsuit is coming from, and I agree that authors should be protected and people should have to pay for their work. However, at the same time, the works which have no known author it should not matter whether or not they are distributed online. In the article it states that only certain people can use the readings, because they have strict limited user access. This should be okay because they are being used mainly for scholarly purposes.
This is where the world is going. All online! It is comparable to people downloading music from sources like LimeWire and ShareBear. Although it may not be completely ethical, everyone is going to find a way to share things online. Who knows- someday we may be doing all of our reading online!
For more on fair use in copyright, see the following link:
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