[Upd-discuss] Google public domain library?

[Michael Hart]

Is is possible there is a negative "not" missing in the first para below?

>> 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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