[Upd-discuss] Google public domain library?

[Lars Aronsson]

Richard Stallman wrote:
> Under US copyright law, converting the work to a different medium
> creates a new copyright.  So scanned files made from a public-domain
> book would not themselves be in the public domain.

I don't know if this is generally true or how it varies in other 
countries.  But a related problem is important enough:

With or without copyright, it is possible for a digitization project
not to share their "source" (useful for reuse) files such as high
resolution TIFF images and OCR text.  The large scale projects at the
University of Michigan (JSTOR, Making of America)  keep their source
files under the surface of a user interface.  All the user can do is
to enter a search phrase, and then a low resolution page image is
shown, which isn't useful for printing or OCR or copy-and-pasting of
text. Many German digitization projects don't even have a fulltext
search function because they found OCR too hard, the only way to find
anything is to browse an index of articles.  And the user cannot
download high resolution images and make their own OCR.  Some projects
(JSTOR, DigiZeitschriften) contain copyrighted (1920--1980) texts
after having negotiated contracts with publishers and use this fact as
an excuse for hiding the source files, but these archives stay
closed-source also on non-copyrighted (pre 1920) material.

This is where Google Print will most probably end up, and this is why
we still need Brewster Kahle's "Million Book Project" and PG/PGDP as
free alternatives.  We need some Creative Commons license for those
digitization projects that want to declare that they are open-source.
But first we need a clear definition of what "source" means in the
context of digitization projects, so that we can say "no, you aren't"  
when the University of Michigan claims their projects are open.

I really liked NPR's Talk of the Nation interview with Brewster Kahle
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4229570
this Wednesday, but I'm confused about his lack of emphasis on the
openness issue.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se)
  Project Runeberg - free Nordic literature - http://runeberg.org/