1. b (Yeats)
2. e (Stephenson)
3. f (Joyce)
4. a (Hemingway)
5. c (Golden)
6. g (Carr)
7. d (Benkler)

Have any good ones of your own? Let me know.

The way our Copyright Act works, authors are granted a series of exclusive rights when they create a work (17 U.S.C. § 106), and those rights are immediately followed in the with a series of exceptions to those rights (17 U.S.C. §§ 107-122). Generally speaking, they carve out specific places where a righsholder cannot restrict a party’s use of their work, with the catchall “fair use” helping to fill in the gaps.

My read of these sections finds no express right to make (or obtain) a digital copy of a lawfully owned physical work. The closest we get is § 109 – the codification of the First Sale Doctrine – which states that the lawful owner of a particular copy of a work may sell or otherwise dispose of that particular copy. Really, these are the freedoms that you get when you buy a book: you can sell it, lend it, rent it, burn it, leave it on the sidewalk, gift it, or tear it up into little books and sell it chapter by chapter. (Lessig includes a few others in his presentation, including using it as a doorstop and sleeping on it, and really this extends to anything that § 106 does not include. This makes virtually all purchasing of used books legal as well, effectively preventing any distinction between new and used for purposes of this question.) Making a copy of a work doesn’t come as part of those freedoms, so we’d have to find the right somewhere else.

The only section which deals with freedom to reproduce works is § 108, which provides libraries and archives with the right to make back-up copies of items in their collection, subject to several requirements. Sorry to say, but you don’t qualify as a library or archive under that section.

So you’re left with fair use, which warrants a whole other blog post to itself. I will say that cases I’ve seen dealing with photocopiers have been more receptive of copying when done clearly for private, non-commercial purposes, in a way which does not impact the market of the work. A famous case on copying articles from science journals endorsed in dicta a lab technician making a photocopy of a journal article to mark up and take into a lab. On the other hand, cases looking into downloading music when owning the equivalent CDs have given the fair use argument very chilly reception, especially when done on a try-before-you-buy basis. It’s an unexplored area of law with understandably very little case law. (If you’re just making a digital copy for yourself, how is an author to know, much less get worked up enough to sue?)

So I’d say you do not, generally, have the legal right to do so, but I’d be surprised if anyone gives you hell for it.

I think creating a backup of your hardcopy book (whether by retyping, scanning or OCRing it) is probably legal or at least not legally actionable unless you do it en-masse and redistribute it. There’s no way anyone would sue someone for backing up a CD and this is basically the same.

That said ‘downloading a digital copy’ is fraught with peril. While you legally might be able to justify your posession of a digital copy for backup reasons, you would almost definitely have to do something illegal in order to obtain the digital version. Also if it was a different ‘printing’ or release or whatever they might be able to argue that what you downloaded wasn’t the same as what you owned. Certainly the distribution source you got the digital copy from would be breaking copyright law.

IANAL