Last year there was a flurry of announcements surrounding Google’s entry into the book-scanning market called Book Search.
In short, Google is scanning the entire corpus held in libraries at Harvard, Stanford, the New York Public Library, Oxford, the University of Michigan and the University of California System (a recent addition).
In response, several authors and publishers are suing the company for what they consider “copyright” abuse. They claim that Google is distributing the works beyond the scope of the Fair Use provisions under copyright law.
In an op-ed in today’s Washington Post, Richard Ekman (the current president of the Council of Independent Colleges) made several interesting points:
Project Muse, begun in 1993 as a pioneering joint effort of the Johns Hopkins University Press and the university’s Milton S. Eisenhower Library, makes available electronic “bundles” of current issues of journals to students and teachers in scattered locations. And JSTOR — a coalition of journal publishers and libraries formed in the mid-1990s to create a reliable online collection of hundreds of older, little-used scholarly journals — has brought these specialized works back into common use.Colleges and universities have conflicting interests in this dispute. Some operate their own publishing houses and hope to sell books. Some faculty members are authors and hope to earn royalties from sales. But the major interest of colleges and universities is as users of information — helping thousands of students and teachers find what they need and making these materials available. In this regard, the advantages of Google’s service are enormous, especially for smaller colleges without huge budgets for library purchases.
Unfortunately, this is not the first time that publishers have resisted an important technology instead of figuring out how to use it to their advantage. Music publishers a century ago tried to stop the manufacture of player pianos because they feared that sales of sheet music would decline. In fact, player pianos helped increase the number of buyers of sheet music.
See also: No More Information Piracy and Congress Throwing Rocks At New Things
{ 2 comments }
It seems to me that the libraries own the books and magazines. So if they want to allow people to copy them, that’s their perogative. The books are already their for the public to use with-out paying for them. I don’t understand what consistant principle authors and people against this can stand on.
Tracy
http://digg.com/business_finance/Who_Owns_The_Alphabet_And_Its_Derivatives
Here is a googolAlphabets project
The main goal is to ascertain who owns the Alphabets.
G.
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