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Microsoft watermarks clutter up public domain works—and Google-style copyright issues also arise
March 13, 2008 | 1:39 am
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By David Rothman
I’ve knocked Google for watermarking every bleepin’ page of public domain works. Now, out of fairness, here’s the same grumble against Microsoft. When I downloaded a PDF for a quick look at Of Old People and the Things that Pass, I saw a corporate watermark repeated hundreds of times. Mind you, I think both Google and Microsoft should get public credit at the starts of digitized works. But everywhere?
A larger issue is the that these editions come with gotchas that could inhibit some imaginative uses in the future. A notice in the version found in the Internet Archive PDF of Old People says: “Digitized for Microsoft Corporation by the Internet Archive in 2007. From University of Toronto. May be used for non-commercial, personal, research, or educational purposes, or any fair use. May not be indexed in a commercial service.” Not even indexed? So much for an open Web, huh?
Possible future role for TeleRead: Yes, yes, Microsoft, Google and IA—I know digitization projects need to be sustainable. What would you think of government grants for such activities, with the understanding there would be no usage restrictions? Here’s to genuine, unshackled public domain editions!
Related: Big thanks to Branko for sharing his discovery with the TeleBlog community! We’re a global blog, and I’d like to see more appreciations of literature from outside the States, especially from smaller countries such as the Netherlands—which, come to think of it, is hardly small in the e-book world, given the cutting-edge activities of iRex Technologies and the display side of Philips.
Housekeeping: I’m going up to New York today for The World in Your Library conference and may not post today or tomorrow. Perhaps others can fill in the gap.
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Comments:
I also occasionally see people trying to establish a copyright interest in OCR’ed text of a public domain text. I’ve seen universities, for example, that have taken a public domain newspaper article, posted the text of that in a web page and put a very clear “this is copyright.” IANAL but its my understanding such claims would be especially weak in court so I’ve tended to ignore them and reproduce it anyway (thought not identically to the U’s presentation). But it creates a lot of FUD as well as confusion about whether these docs are really in the public domain.
There is a good word for this: Copyfraud (see Mazzone’s excellent article)
Once in the PD, always in the PD.
They could just as usefully warn people that they are forbidden to eat it with tomato sauce; that warning would have just as much legal effect.
However, I see no reason why they can’t tag the book to show who did the work of making it available to us. Credit lines are always in good taste.