Quoting Bernhard Eversberg <ev_at_BIBLIO.TU-BS.DE>:
> "Kessinger is taking books Google has digitized, filing for
> International Standard Book Numbers (ISBN), and taking them out of
> public domain."
Reprinting a PD book does NOT take it out of the public domain, with
the exception of certain compilations:
"An important wrinkle to understand about public domain material is
that, while each work belongs to the public, collections of public
domain works may be protected by copyright. If, for example, someone
has collected public domain images in a book or on a website, the
collection as a whole may be protectible even though individual images
are not. You are free to copy and use individual images but copying
and distributing the complete collection may infringe what is known as
the “collective works” copyright. Collections of public domain
material will be protected if the person who created it has used
creativity in the choices and organization of the public domain
material. This usually involves some unique selection process, for
example, a poetry scholar compiling a book -- The Greatest Poems of
e.e. cummings."
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter8/8-a.html
also:
http://www.publicdomainsherpa.com/false-copyright-claims.html
kc
> [! Wonder what Munich is thinking about that]
>
> "Kessinger Publishing produced, in print on demand form, 190,175
> titles in 2009.[1][2]"
>
> And then you wrote,
>
> "More than anything else, libraries need a real success they can point
> to."
>
> It looks like Google is pursuing their plans of turning their now
> immense resources of scanned stuff into a marketable product:
>
> http://books.google.com/intl/de/help/ebooks/overview.html
>
> You *can* still download the same "ebooks" for free from GBS, but the
> whole thing is morphing into a new marketing platform - and isn't it
> inevitable? Note the phrase "... and taking them out of the
> public domain". When what they actually do will be nothing but
> downloading a pdf from GBS, print it, paste a new ISBN on it and sell
> it to the customer. Look a this example:
> http://books.google.de/books?id=lkcAAAAAcAAJ&dq=%22Denksteine+deutscher+Geschichte+des+Jahres+1842%22
> No fewer than 4 Kessinger "Neuauflagen" attached under "Other editions",
> with 4 different ISBNs. No result under "Find in a library". But you
> find them in Amazon, with no link to GBS.
> While GBS themselves still displays their "free edition" under
> "Similar books".
>
> Libraries have been passively involved here, making their books
> available for scanning. But is this a success they can point to?
> Can they top it with something their own? I think we need to grasp
> the nature and the size of the challenge, and then think what miracles
> catalogs, next generation or not, might work to impress the general
> public. Conceivably, the confusing and frequently changing GBS etc.
> might not be that difficult to top, if it weren't for the rights issues
> on the one hand and their full-text advantage search on the other.
>
> B.Eversberg
>
--
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
Received on Thu Aug 18 2011 - 11:14:11 EDT