Great Ormond Street children's hospital is worried that that Google's online publishing scheme could cost it much-needed income. The hospital, which receives all the royalties from sales and performances of Peter Pan in the UK, fears that it could suffer a drop in revenue if Google includes the children's classic in its plan to scan, digitise and make searchable the world's books. Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity has received royalties from Peter Pan since 1929. An Act of Parliament, passed in 1988, extended the book's copyright indefinitely. If people stopped buying the book, and accessed it through Google's service, the hospital — which cares for seriously ill children — fears it could lose millions of pounds. A spokesman for Great Ormond Street said he hadn't had a chance to view the site yet but hoped Google would think twice before publishing the book. "I wouldn't be surprised if Google do this, but it will rob the hospital of a major core of its charity revenue," he said. Great Ormond Street's fears may be unfounded though. Peter Pan is already freely available online through Project Gutenberg, which catalogues books whose copyright has expired in the US — where the Hospital's copyright does not apply.
Comment. Hello? If Google treats Peter Pan as a book under copyright, then it will not "publish" the book in any sense. It will offer searching and short snippets of text. It will provide free advertising for the book. The hospital should be celebrating. If Google treats it as a book in the public domain --which it is everywhere but England-- then the Google Library program may offer free online full-text reading. But in that case, the "fault" is not with Google but with the copyright laws of the world, which actually let copyrights expire. The fact that the Ormand Street Hospital is an excellent charity should not obscure the fact that the special legislation to extend its copyright in perpetuity was an act of piracy from the public domain. It is perverse to criticize users who take advantage of their rights to use public-domain literature rather than to criticize privateers who want to re-privatize that literature and enclose the commons.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 11/08/2005 08:54:00 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.
