The HTRC has developed a process to define and work within the concept of non-consumptive computational access to support the fair-use of the HTDL corpus as defined within the Google Books Settlement Agreement that was a part of the Authors Guild et al. v. Google Inc case.
Currently the HTRC defines the process for non-consumptive use of the HTDL corpus as:
Research in which computational analysis is performed on one or more books, but not research in which a researcher reads or displays.
Operationally, from the perspective of the HTRC research cyberinfrastructure, the HTRC defines non-consumptive research as:
That which requires that no action or set of actions on the part of users, either acting alone or in cooperation with other users over the duration of one or multiple sessions can result in sufficient information gathered from a collection of copyrighted works to reassemble pages from the collection.
This concept has been further refined in the course of the development of the HTRC Data Capsule \cite{Zeng_2014} for secure data analysis and the development of the HTRC Workset Ontology \cite{Jett_2016}.