Therefore, until 1998 it was legal for the owner of a copy of a copyrighted work to circumvent the access control for a noninfringing use. However, the Librarian of Congress is given regulatory power to exempt certain classes of work from the prohibition on circumvention of technical access restrictions. Copyright Infringement Suppose Alice, a scholar who owns a roomful of books, wants to search all of the books for references to Francis Bacon, accumulating a list of citations. Alice may employ an assistant to skim through the books and collect this information. Similarly, if Alice owns a collection of copyrighted books on digital media, she may want to perform a similar search electronically.
Computers offer many practical advantages for search applications.
It might be prohibitively expensive to search a large collection by hand, but doing the same search on an inexpensive computer might provide an instant result. Thus, manual searches cannot substitute for computerized searches. Laws prohibiting scholars from using computerized assistants artificially impede the progress of scholarship and science. If the digital works are technically protected in such a way that they can be viewed on the screen but not electronically searched, then the technical protection interferes with noninfringing uses. In this scenario, the publisher may meet Alice's needs by providing a generic text search facility.