[Upd-discuss] Google public domain library?

[michael.davis@law.csuohio.edu]

While it may be true that conversion to a different medium may, at times,
create a new copyright, the copyright applies to the medium and not the
underlying work. Capturing the underlying work and reconverting it, even
to the same medium, should present few, if any, copyright problems.


> 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/
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Mickey Davis
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