Didn't google do almost exactly this with google books - making agreements with libraries and digitising their collections without paying the publishers or the authors? Maybe I misunderstood.
> The Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit previewed as much in HathiTrust and Google Books, cases that “test[ed] the boundaries of fair use.” Google Books, 804 F.3d at 206. The defendant in HathiTrust scanned whole copies of millions of books, including those protected by valid copyrights, to create a database on which the general public could search for particular terms across the scanned works. 755 F.3d at 91. The creation of this “full-text searchable database [was] a quintessentially transformative use,” the court held, because “the result of a word search is different in purpose, character, expression, meaning, and message from the page (and the book) from which it is drawn.” Id. at 97. Importantly, the database did not “allow users to view any portion of the books they [were] searching” and therefore, unlike IA’s Website, “d[id] not add into circulation any new, human-readable copies of any books” or “merely repackage or republish the originals.” Id.
> Google Books similarly found transformative use in Google’s scanning of copyrighted books to create a database that included a “snippet view” search function that allowed readers to view a few lines of text containing searched-for terms. 804 F.3d at 208. The snippet view showed the searcher “just enough context surrounding the searched term” to help the searcher evaluate whether the book fell within the scope of the searcher’s interest “without revealing so much as to threaten the author’s copyright interests.” Id. at 208, 216. But the Court of Appeals cautioned that “[i]f Plaintiffs’ claim were based on Google’s converting their books into a digitized form and making that digitized version accessible to the public,” precisely what the Publishers allege in this case, the “claim [for copyright infringement] would be strong.” Id. at 225. If HathiTrust and Google Books demarcated the boundaries of fair use, this case shows what conduct remains squarely beyond fair use.