A federal judge last week dismissed Cornell alum Kevin Vanginderen's $1 million lawsuit over a 1983 Cornell Chronicle article digitized by the library and crawled by Google....
That suit notwithstanding, Cornell librarians this week said the decision in the first case was a victory for the library...."I do share concerns that individuals might have about potentially embarrassing material being made public," Cornell university librarian Anne Kenney said, "but I don?t think you can go back and distort the public record." Kenney said that the library has no plans to alter its digitization procedures as a result of the case. "I feel this is a real victory for the library in terms of being able to make documentary material accessible," she said.
Cornell University Library archivist Peter Hirtle reflected on the potential negative impact that could have resulted had Moskowitz found that digitization was the equivalent of republication. "It would be disastrous if every time we scan something, we had to take the same editorial responsibility as the initial publisher," Hirtle said, adding that verdict reaffirmed "the important role libraries can play in promoting free speech and providing ready public access to information on the activities of government."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/13/2008 04:59:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
