Today, the ACH is celebrating a very favorable ruling for digital research and fair use in a United States district court. This summer, we joined a group of 46 digital humanities scholars in filing two amicus briefs in lawsuits related to digitization of in-copyright and orphaned works in the Google Books and HathiTrust corpora.
The briefs describe how DH scholars employ innovative data-mining techniques in ways consistent with fair use, and how scholarship could be held back if this kind of research is not well supported by the courts. Yesterday's ruling in the matter of Authors Guild v. HathiTrust cites the Digital Humanities brief twice as meaningful evidence in support of scholarly fair use.
This effort, spearheaded by Matthew Jockers, Matthew Sag, and Jason Schultz on behalf of the DH community, is described here (paywalled link) and the brief itself is available here.