This article describes Google's plans to create the greatest digital library the world has ever seen, and its current effort to digitize the nine million books in the library of Stanford University. Already, Google's engineers have developed sophisticated technology for the purpose.
"When Google announced the library scanning project, in December 2004, it had four library partners besides Stanford. Two of them (Oxford University and the New York Public Library) took a legally cautious approach to digitization, permitting Google to copy only public domain works. A third, the University of Michigan, took the opposite view, asserting forcefully that Google could scan every one of its 7 million books. Harvard hedged its bets, initially agreeing only to a limited test program. Last week, the University of California signed on as a sixth Google partner. Its scanning program will include both public domain and copyrighted material."In September 2005,
"the Authors Guild filed a class action suit against Google, seeking statutory damages and an injunction to halt the scanning. A month later, five major publishers -- McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, Penguin Group (USA), Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons -- sued as well, with the support of the AAP" (Association of American Publishers".Because whole books or even whole pages are not displayed, Google's supporters argue that
"making copyrighted books searchable is the kind of 'transformative use' permitted under copyright law. The publishers and the Authors Guild completely disagree, arguing that Google's unlicensed creation and retention of digital copies -- as well as its creation of additional copies for the libraries -- are illegal."
1 comment:
I have been thinking about this. I surely hope that Google is allowed by the courts to go ahead and digitize tens of millions of books and to build a knowledge base using the contents of the scanned books. It actually seems to me that as reading books and looking at pictures are fair use of copyrighted materials, so too scanning of books to create a useful computerized information base should also be fair use. If the law is interpreted to prohibit such use, the law should be changed.
I think libraries, especially university libraries, should be allowed (perhaps under the fair use terms of copyright law) to develop electronic duplicate libraries. Doing so would transform the library collection in ways that would empower the schollarly community of the university. It would also allow universities to have larger collections, and to manage the collections more efficiently, and to backup the collections (useful in the case of flood or fire),
U.S. copyright law is based on utilitarian principles -- the greatest good for the greatest number. Assuring that authors and publishers can realize funds from their work serves the public good TO A POINT. But in a utilitarian system, the benefit of expanding author's rights has to be weighed against the lost benefit of constraining the users rights.
In the above examples, new users rights to index content and to analyze content electronically will provide significant social benefits, and should be recognized. Indeed, scanning copyrighted material should be fair use, unless the user seeks to distribute copies of the material, analogous to reading or viewing copyrighted materials.
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