ONLINE COPYRIGHT
COPYRIGHT ISSUES IN ONLINE LIBRARIES
Imagine all literary and academic publications and all forms of books, periodicals and articles on every conceivable topic in the world available to everyone at the click of a button. All published books would be preserved for eternity—not in a physical form or in a musty, remote library, but in digital format for the world to access at any time from any place. Te objective is commendable and the task, mammoth. Should such a plan be successful though, it would make all knowledge available to everyone regardless of their status.
With this objective, several players in the online market have attempted to create online libraries by using digital optical character recognition technology, which enables them to not just scan books in the form of an image but also to catalogue the books and make their text searchable by terms or keywords. Admirable as the task is, it is plagued with obstacles, such as language barriers, the complex task of cataloguing millions of books, anti-competitive allegations, privacy concerns and, most importantly, copyright infringement issues.
It is important to understand that most of these projects—the Google Books Library Project, the abandoned Microsoſt Live Search Books initiative, Europeana, Gallica, etc.—rely primarily on two sources for their book collections. Te first, and probably the most important, is through collaborations with libraries, while the second is through collaborations with publishers and individual authors.
Take Google, for example. It has collaborated with several libraries with huge collections in its Library Project and with several authors and publishers in its Partner Programme. Trough both these sources, Google recently claimed to have scanned more than 10 million books. In comparison, Microsoſt scanned about 750,000 books through its now defunct Live Search initiative. Tese projects aim to provide web users with ‘e-versions’ of books in the public domain and in copyright.
In order to understand the copyright infringement issues raised by these projects, it is important to understand the kinds of books made available and the extent to which they are made available. Primarily, the books are already in the public domain and the use of these books by online libraries for full public viewing is not merely allowed, but is a right. In the case of copyright- protected books, when they reach the online library for digitisation and online publication through the publishers or the authors or owners of copyright in the work, there may be no issue of copyright infringement. In the case of Google’s Partner Programme, participating publishers and authors voluntarily scan (or allow Google to scan) their books and make them available online. In such cases, the rights owners are themselves seeking wider viewership and issues of copyright rarely arise.
Te issue of copyright infringement can arise when a book is scanned and made available to the public over the Internet while it is within its
34 World Intellectual Property Review March/April 2010
www.worldipreview.com
©iStockphoto.com / clu
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