On 7/27/2011 9:18 PM, Alexander Johannesen wrote:
> Yes, it's an interesting lawsuit and all, but there needs to be made a
> distinction between having the material in digital form (archived,
> possibly OCRed) and making digital copied material available (like
> Google Books do). I'm not interested in the latter, nor arguing for
> it, and shouldn't really come in contact with the Google case.
Maybe you think a distinction needs to be made, but what makes you think
the law does? Copyright protects the right to copy, whether or not you
make it available. If copying without making it available is fair use,
well, one aspect of that is what the GBS lawsuit would determine if it
went to trial.
Libraries do have some exemptions to make archival copies that they
don't show to anyone or let anyone use, I am unclear on the details of
when they apply or if they could apply with digital copies (probably
only of digital copies that hte library made themselves of things the
library still has in their stacks and keeps there, if anything) -- but
that's not really what you were proposing, is it? The library make
digitizations and then not use them for _anything_ except backup copies
just in case sometime in the future they are needed? I thought you were
proposing that the library provide search over them.
Well, that's exactly what the GBS lawsuit was about, in fact. (Contrary
to what some now think, when the lawsuit was made, Google was not
providing fulltext of possibly in copyright works to anyone. Only
search.). You are incorrect if you think copyright somehow clearly
allows this.
This conversation grows tiresome. But I think you are over-simplifying
in what you claim the law is, just as you are oversimplifying in several
other things you're saying about libraries in this thread.
Received on Thu Jul 28 2011 - 10:57:39 EDT