David Whelan, Google's Scan Plan Hits More Bumps, Forbes, May 31, 2005. Excerpt: 'Google's utopian project has hit a few bumps in the five months since it was announced, and Google is in the rare position of having to defend itself. The idea made a lot of sense given Google's search expertise, its incredible stash of technology resources and its stated mission to organize the world's information. Google Print also complemented efforts within the company to develop perfect machine language translation, which means that some day a scanned book will theoretically be readable in any language, anywhere in the world....Givler says he wrote the letter because managers at Google would give him canned or evasive answers to questions he and other publishers posed. Publishers don't know yet how much content from a particular book will be available to Google under fair use. Or even whether Google's digital copies of copyrighted books are permissible in the first place, even if they never get shared. Google's Tom Turvey responded with a letter to the Web site Publisher's Lunch saying that publishers don't have to participate in its program. "Publishers remain in complete control of which books are displayed on Google, just as Web publishers are regarding inclusion of their Web sites in the index. For any books scanned at libraries, publishers may simply choose not to display these books within Google's index--no questions asked." But Givler says the company has never fully addressed the propriety of scanning the books in the first place, regardless of whether they let publishers opt out on the back end. "Google's really asking for trouble here," says Jeffrey Neuburger, an intellectual property lawyer at Brown Raysman in New York, who doubts that Google can make initial scans without permission....The company hopes [publisheers] might eventually realize the copyright concerns are minor related to the ability to hock more books to searchers. According to a Google statement: "We believe there are many business advantages for publishers to participate in Google Print."..."While legal issues involving copyright law are always complex, we believe the project is wholly consistent with the core principle of copyright law," says James Hilton, the head librarian at the University of Michigan. "That principle, the very foundation of copyright law, is to promote the advancement and dissemination of knowledge." In other words, the scanning will probably go on.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/31/2005 10:38:00 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.
