University of Michigan Puts HathiTrust Orphan Works Project on Hold

The University of Michigan (UM) Library today released a statement announcing that it would be examining its "flawed" pilot process for identifying orphan works, putting its HathiTrust orphan works project effectively on hold. This follows reaction about the status of several works on its publicly posted orphan candidates list.

The statement also comes in the wake of a lawsuit filed on September 12 by the Authors Guild, Australian and Canadian authors' organizations, and eight authors against HathiTrust, UM, and four other member universities to stop them from "reproducing, distributing and/or displaying" copyrighted works.

The HathiTrust orphan works project was previously due to make some full-text electronic versions of orphans—in-copyright works for which rights holders cannot be found—available to the UM community starting October 13.

"Once we create a more robust, transparent, and fully documented process, we will proceed with the work, because we remain as certain as ever that our proposed uses of orphan works are lawful and important to the future of scholarship and the libraries that support it," UM said in the statement.

UM's announcement follows several blog posts on the Authors Guild website claiming to find rights holders for a number of works on the HathiTrust list, including Pulitzer Prize winner James Gould Cozzens's Confusion and J.R. Salamanca's The Lost Country, among others. LJ pointed out earlier this month that another work that appeared on the list, a 1933 English translation of Jean de Brunhoff's The Story of Babar, had a likely heir in de Brunhoff's son Laurent. A number of books have since been removed from the list.

It could be argued that the public release of the orphan candidates list did the job it was intended to do: to help find potential rights holders-a point that UM made in its statement: "It was always our belief that we would be more likely to succeed with the cooperation and assistance of authors and publishers. This turns out to be correct. The widespread dissemination of the list has had the intended effect: rights holders have been identified, which is in fact the project's primary goal."

However, UM university librarian Paul Courant told LJ that some of the works in question "were, in effect, too easy to find."

"We have to go back and look at each one again and learn, from the mistakes we made, how we can do this reliably," he said, adding that the process "will take a little bit of time." As a result, the works currently on the orphan works candidate list are "very unlikely" to be released as scheduled.

Courant also said that the action was not in response to the recent lawsuit, but a response "to our own evaluation that the process needs work."