The Authors Guild, Inc. et al v. Hathitrust et al

Filing 78

DECLARATION of DR. MARC MAURER in Support re: 74 MOTION for Summary Judgment.. Document filed by Georgina Kleege, Blair Seidlitz, The National Federation of the Blind, Courtney Wheeler. (Goldstein, Daniel)

IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK

THE AUTHORS GUILD, INC., et al.,
Plaintiffs,

Case No. 11-cv-6351(HB)

v.
HATHITRUST, et al.,
Defendants.

DECLARATION OF DR. MARC MAURER IN
SUPPORT OF MOTION FOR SUMMARY JUDGMENT
I, Marc Maurer, do hereby declare that:
1. I am over eighteen years of age and am competent to make this Declaration.
2. My business address is 200 East Wells Street at Jernigan Place, Baltimore, Maryland
21230.
3. I am legally blind and have been my entire life.
4. I received a bachelor’s degree from Notre Dame University in 1974 and a J.D. from the
University of Indiana School of Law in 1977.
5. I am the President of the National Federation of the Blind, a position I have held since
1986.
6. The National Federation of the Blind was founded in 1940 by a number of individuals
notably including Jacobus tenBroek, a blind constitutional scholar, whose works, such as The
Antislavery Origins of the Fourteenth Amendment, later published under the title Equal Under
Law, The Right of the Disabled to Live in the World: Disability and the Law of Torts, and
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OCR, and render into what becomes a poor-quality digital file of the book that can be difficult to
read with a screen reader. Because the work involved to create these scans is time-consuming
and the DSS offices are often overworked, it sometimes takes months or until the end of the
semester for the student to actually receive the accessible material.
12. In late 2004, when I became aware that Google was making arrangements with major
academic libraries to make digital copies of their collections ̶ works never before available
independently to the blind, at a volume never before available to the blind ̶ I realized the
revolutionary and equalizing potential the scope of such a project could have for the blind,
particularly the blind scholar or student, and set out to ensure these works would be accessible to
us.
13. After an initial inquiry to Google about accessibility did not yield a positive response, I
determined to visit each of the academic libraries partnering with Google to press upon them the
importance of accessibility. Our first stop, in early 2006, was the University of Michigan, where
we were advised by John Wilkin and the library’s counsel, Jack Bernard, that it was the firm
intention of the University of Michigan that the digital collection be available to the blind and
they described how they envisioned that access would be triggered through certification of
blindness by the DSS office.
14. In 2008, the University of Michigan advised that it had set up the infrastructure to begin
to make the collection available to blind students and invited us to the campus for a
demonstration of how the system worked.
History of the Publishing Industry’s
Lack of Interest in a Marketplace that Includes the Blind
15. For more than 20 years, the National Federation of the Blind has vigorously worked to
ensure that digital information is rendered accessible on devices that are accessible.
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