Google To Digitize World’s Libraries
This New York Times article by John Markoff and Edward Wyatt confirms what we’ve been strongly suspecting for some time: Google has plans to digitize large portions of the holdings of several of the world’s major research libraries in the coming years. Public domain materials will be available in their entirety, and the article hints that short excerpts from materials still under copyright will be available.
This is great news. Having this material available has the potential to place in the foreground the importance of the public domain. Further, Google may have the resources and incentive to figure out comprehensively which post-1923 books are already in the public domain for failure of formalities.
It will be interesting to see how Google and the libraries plan to justify digitizing entire copyrighted books without a license. Even if they’re not included in the public database, merely digitizing them involves making one or more unauthorized copies. I’m sure they have a plan; my plan might be to make deals with all the copyright holders you can find, then just digitize the whole thing and settle with any copyright holders you couldn’t find. But that might be expensive, even for Google.
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Google Wow
John Palfrey on the tremendously exciting news that Google will digitize and make searchable some of world’s best research libraries: “It brings with it a host of issues about the need to revisit, and likely to reform, the intellectual property…
Trackback by Copyfight — December 14, 2004 @ 11:34 am
Google Wow
John Palfrey on the tremendously exciting news that Google will digitize and make searchable some of world’s best research libraries: “It brings with it a host of issues about the need to revisit, and likely to reform, the intellectual property…
Trackback by Copyfight — December 14, 2004 @ 11:34 am
Google Wow
John Palfrey on the tremendously exciting news that Google will digitize and make searchable some of world’s best research libraries: “It brings with it a host of issues about the need to revisit, and likely to reform, the intellectual property…
Trackback by Copyfight — December 14, 2004 @ 11:48 am
From a lay perspective, this would appear to be fair use. As Lessig has pointed out, however, this just means means Google gets to hire a lawyer. I’d like to see this go to court, actually, just so we could see what fair use really means in this digital era…
Comment by Randy Zagar — December 14, 2004 @ 4:16 pm
It’s interesting how painfully close they come to the specific exemptions in 17 U.S.C. s. 108. So far as I can tell, if the employees of the library made the scans themselves, instead of outsourcing to Google, it would be fine, but that this plan falls outside of the 108(a) test. Maybe they’re going to assert fair use based on a combination of the four factors with the near-miss under 108?
Comment by James Grimmelmann — December 14, 2004 @ 9:42 pm
If this is a repeat, I apologize – I sent this and it seemed to disappear.
James – 108 needs to be revised. Even if (a) was satisfied, I don’t see anything that helps enough. (b) allows preservation of unpublished works (c) allows copies of published works that are out-of-print and damaged, deteriorating or stolen, (d)(e) allows copies for users on request — but the library can’t keep a copy
I think this project (and the Internet Archive million book project) will help the case that 108 needs to be updated to make reasonable copies like the ones planned by google print. Meanwhile, we’re back to fair use.
Comment by Mary Minow — December 25, 2004 @ 4:02 am
I see my comment went through that time… but with a (c) symbol instead of ( c ) which is what I intended! Also, this time I linked my name to an entry on the librarylaw blog about the publishers buy-in to google print.
Comment by Mary Minow — December 25, 2004 @ 4:06 am