...[A] momentous, ill-considered shift is now afoot that threatens to limit the public rights in the collections assembled and maintained, often at public expense, in libraries around the globe.
Today Google and other businesses are scanning millions of books from the world’s great libraries and offering access to them on the Web. This conjures up the vision of a vast, free, Internet public library of accumulated knowledge. It seems like a marriage made in heaven—the union of corporate capital and enormous library collections, carrying knowledge into virtually every home and workplace. Unfortunately, it’s not....
Barriers to use of digital texts are popping up almost as fast as books are being scanned. The rights that readers enjoyed in the print world are being eroded as books are electronically transformed. In the process, we’re at risk of losing some of the rights we enjoyed under copyright....
Before the Internet, there was little argument over what people could do with public domain works. They could do anything. But technology makes it possible to impose new technical and contractual protections that can be applied willy-nilly to in-copyright and public domain works alike....
For example, companies that are scanning library collections have required users to gain online access to books solely via proprietary search engines. They also have prohibited users from employing third-party computing tools such as screen readers for the visually impaired or scholarly text analysis tools. In effect, they are securing and enforcing a monopoly on the digital texts of works that are in the public domain. Of course, other businesses might also scan a library’s collections, but this is a substantial undertaking and, as a practical matter, isn’t apt to happen anytime soon....
From a commercial perspective, it seems pretty simple. If a company pays to scan works, shouldn’t they get to decide who can see them and under what conditions? No, they shouldn’t be allowed to make such a decision. The works they’re exploiting are available as a result of public funding or the tax advantages afforded non-profit institutions, so the public’s interest should take precedence....
Update. For more on the event where Johnson delivered this paper, see the report we posted yesterday.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/03/2008 12:48:00 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.
