Beau C. Robicheaux, Harvard-Google Project Faces Copyright Woes, Harvard Crimson, March 15, 2005. Excerpt: 'Three months after undertaking an ambitious project to digitize thousands of books, Harvard University Library (HUL) and the Google Print project are facing scrutiny from publishing organizations, who claim the project may infringe copyright law. Google is in the process of scanning 40,000 Harvard library books, which will be made available for browsing on the internet....In December, Google Project Manager Adam Smith said that books in the public domain will be fully available online so researchers can use Google Print in place of a trip to the library. He added that much smaller excerpts of copyrighted works will be displayed....But Sally Morris, chief executive of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers --an international association of over 300 not-for-profit publishers-- wrote in an e-mail that even with these safeguards, she and the publishers she represents object to the project, which plans to digitize copyrighted books. "The law does not permit wholesale copying (which is what digitisation is) by a commercial organisation of works that are still in copyright," she wrote. "It is also illegal to make those works available digitally once they have been copied."...But Jonathan Zittrain, faculty co-director of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, wrote in an e-mail that he believes the pilot project is not a copyright infringement. "This is what fair use is designed for," he wrote. "By showing only snippets, the market for the books themselves is not harmed." '
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/15/2005 10:58:00 AM.
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.
