Book People Archive

Re: More About Google's Deal with U of Cal

someone with low reading comprehension said:
>    For example, the university must 
>    prevent other search engines 
>    from scanning the books.

um, that's a badly botched analysis...

the university must (take reasonable measures to)
prevent other search engines -- and the public --
from doing _robotic_harvesting_ of the _scans_...

those "other search engines" remain free
to scan the actual physical books however;
google doesn't have any kind of lock on 'em.

now, it would be very nice if google would
make it official and explicit that their scans
could be given freely to the o.c.a. as well...

but hey, even if google made it explicit that
the o.c.a. could _not_ use the google scans,
could anyone really blame them?   i mean,
really, why should google fund any scanning
if microsoft and yahoo could just sit back
and wait for the all of their scans to roll in?

as i have said in the past, many times now,
we need to harvest google's scans ourselves,
as individuals, working collaboratively (and
not using "robotic" or "automatic" methods),
then make 'em freely available to the public.

i'm speaking of the public-domain scans,
which _belong_ to the public, and cannot
be construed as copyrighted material, and
certainly not as the property of _google_.
of course we could not post the scans of
books that are "protected" by copyright...

but it's important to note the university
itself seems to have made a commitment
to make the public-domain scans available
to the public, at no cost.   it's also important
to note that google has made similar claims.
(that was even their "opening gambit" to u.c.)

so i'm not sure what brewster's point is...

as the u.c. librarian pointed out, o.c.a. scanned
about 3,500 books in a recent month, while
google is going to be doing 3,000 books a day.
i appreciate the difficulty of brewster's position,
but what does he expect the u.c. system to do?

finally, a pre-1923 cyberlibrary will seem to be
suffering from a _searing_ paucity of material;
what we need is to free the copyrighted stuff...

-bowerbird