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Will reprint sites have to drop Google Books?
January 31, 2009 | 2:36 pm
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By Paul Biba
Yakov Shafranovich runs the interesting site publicdomainreprints.org. The aim of the site is: “This is an experimental project, which is focused on archiving and republishing public domain works. At this time, this service can take a book from any of the supported sites such as the the Internet Archive (books in public domain ONLY) and reprint it via print on demand techology.”
One of the sites he supports is Google Books, with about 3 million books available. However, according to his blog Google has changed its terms of service and he may no longer be able to offer these books.Here is what he says:
The main change is the first guideline – it used to say that only non-commercial use is allows. Now it has been replaced by two new guidelines: no hosting, and no reprints including helping people reprint.
An interesting wrinkle about the new hosting restriction is that the Internet Archive is currently hosting about 537,000 PDFs of public domain books from Google Book Search. Under the old rules, non-commercial hosting was ok. What is the story under the new guidelines?
The new no reprint guideline seems to be directed towards services like my own PublicDomainReprints.org with the second part
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Comments:
As I see it Google steal books from dead people, who certainly NEVER envisaged anything like the internet. They do NO creative or editorial work at all (unlike Gutenberg) and then they imply dictated terms to people WITHOUT specifying what terms and by what right they presume to dictate them… could we refer them to the famous retort so often cited in “Private Eye” in the case of Arkell ltd vs Pressdram…ie “Go Away” in coarse language.
In the US, at least, you can’t claim copyright on an out-of-copyright work just through simple mechanical reproduction of the work.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp.
So I suspect that Google are trying to suggest that they have authority over reproductions of their scans of out-of-copyright works when in fact they do not.