Saturday 16 May 2009

Continuance: Google Books and mass digitization

Yesterday I discovered the book "Teaching Library in Deutschland" in GoogleBooks.



This book was published in 2005 and is copyrightly material! Google is audacious in digitizing it and giving nearly full access to it (only a few pages were left out). The only acknowledgement they make is to publish the information "This is copyrighted material" at the bottom of the pages! They have chosen confrontation: they are breaking the rules deliberately, hoping for the long arm of the law (that it takes years to until there is a consistent international decision in copyright questions). Google is digitizing books on a large scale without asking for permission. On googlebooksettlement.com authors and other rightsholder are able to raise an objection. German authors are fighting back since March 2009 with the so-called "Heidelberger Appell" which beared fruit in the "The Freedom to Publish and the Protection of Copyright".
A collection of articles dealing with the "Heidelberger Appell" can be found here (unfortunately only german articles). A few days ago there was a good posting at IBI-weblog (german) where several recent articles were contemplated.
Two weeks ago there was held an international conference with 250 people from 19 different countries regarding the topic copyright: "The Future Of Copyright – What Is The Right Protection?". The presentations were translated into french, german and english. Until now there are no presentations/papers/podcasts etc. or results available. (Or did somebody find sth. about this conference?)

To shorten it up here: the suspense continues ;) I hope the authors are winning and the intellectual property remains protected.

2 comments:

Steffi_S. said...

well, here are statements from a more experienced librarian, Robert Darnton (head of the library of the Harvard University): http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23518

Steffi_S. said...

what I wanted to say in 2009 with this posting was an akward feeling that is now summed up in Mangei's article "Viel Spreu, wenig Weizen" (german) , somehow I felt what's common today (e.g.profit organisation's distribution of books that prevpusly belonged to the libraries, PoD-books of former wikipedia-content ...)

 
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