In a letter to the chairmen of the House and Senate Judiciary subcommittees overseeing intellectual property issues, the nation's oldest consumer advocacy group raised concerns about a forthcoming ambitious effort to catalogue the entire collections of four major American libraries. The letter, signed by National Consumers League President Linda Golodner, acknowledges the tremendous potential value in Google Inc.'s bold vision for the new initiative, in which the complete collection of works at the university libraries of Stanford, Michigan, and Harvard, and of the New York Public Library, would be scanned and made available electronically to the public. The Washington-based advocacy group warned, however, that the project, which will resume scanning on November 1, 2005 poses dramatic threats to the principle of copyrights; fairness to authors; and cultural selectivity, exclusion, and censorship....Due to the fact that a significant portion of the volumes in the collections remain under copyright, having been written after 1923 and not legally considered a matter of public domain, the advocacy group warned that clearly, Google should be required to obtain appropriate rights before reproducing the works of others. Google's current plan would require authors to "opt-out" of its program, which places and inappropriate burden on copyright holders...."We do not doubt Google's good intentions," wrote Golodner. "But any database which represents itself as being a 'full' or 'complete' record of American culture as reflected in the collections of four major research libraries must, in fact, be complete. The sheer scope and cumbersome nature of the project may force Google to cut corners at some point, raising inevitable questions. To the extent that Google finds itself drawing lines for inclusion or exclusion based even indirectly on content --style, political slant, format, author, and so on-- it makes itself a censor of our history and culture."
Comment. Two quick replies. (1) As I argued earlier this month, the simple critique of opt-out "is deceptive because it assumes without proof that the Google copying is not fair use. Hence it begs the question at the heart of the lawsuit. If the Google copying is fair use, then no prior permission is needed and the opt-out policy is justified." (2) Google never said that its book-scanning would be "a 'complete' record of American culture," though I'm sure it would be glad to approach that goal asymptotically. The NCL objection not only starts from a false premise, but would abort any project that cannot reach completeness in one step. Does the NCL object to libraries because they don't carry every book? If the NCL really cared about comprehensive coverage, then it would praise this gigantic step toward wider access and monitor the project to see that it doesn't rest on invidious criteria for inclusion. But by objecting to the project's incompleteness as such, without pointing to any evidence of "cultural selectivity, exclusion, and censorship", the NCL implies that no literature should be easy to access until all of it is.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/25/2005 05:13:00 PM.
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.
