Ready for robot-mediated free online access to printed book pages? Johns Hopkins University is experimenting with a system in which a user submits an electronic request for a book, a robot walks the aisles of the meatspace library, finds the book, removes it from the shelf, carries it to a scanning station, and scans the pages of interest to the user, who then reads them online. The same system will work for bound, printed journals.
PS. You might think that this difficult and expensive recourse is only necessary for works that aren't in electronic form from the start. But for ebooks and ejournals, free electronic sharing, especially with multiple users simultaneously, is usually barred by the licensing agreement. Hence, far from a shortcut, that's not even a legal alternative. The beauty of the Johns Hopkins system is that it operates on printed works, where the first sale doctrine applies. Once a library buys a copy of a printed work, it can share the copy any way it likes. The absurdity of IP law can be measured by the lengths to which one must go for a legal workaround.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/29/2002 10:50:00 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.
