Article title, "Google’s Plan for Out-of-Print Books Is Challenged," http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/04/technology/internet/04books.html?_r=1 , to quote:
"The settlement, 'takes the vast bulk of books that are in research libraries and makes them into a single database that is the property of Google,' said Robert Darnton, head of the Harvard University library system. 'Google will be a monopoly.'"
As far as digitization is concerned, it’s amazing how many things one must consider when managing digitization projects in an archive. For instance, who owns this? Google, now, is trying to gain possession to digital rights of as many orphaned items it can. As the digital initiatives coordinator in an archive, I’m a little worried about what impact this will have on institutions that technically have donor agreements for their items (prior to digitization) but that never _actually_ looked into the ownership of rights issue: If we are sloppy about our rights ownership, and if Google looks into it and catches this sloppiness, I must question whether or not they could just steal a digitized (or heck, even non-digitized) item from under our noses. (Hence the anxiety revealed by speakers quoted in the article, as well.)
I might have to list, "Talk to an attorney" at the top of my digitization checklist soon.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment