Google Books, British Library en auteursrecht

Mary Jane Ansell, The Butterfly Book

En de discussie over Google Books gaat verder...
Gisteren maakten de British Library en Google bekend dat Google 250.000 boeken uit de periode 1700 - 1870 uit de collectie van BL gaat digitaliseren. De reproducties zullen beschikbaar komen via http://books.google.co.uk en de website van de BL. Google zal de rekening voor het scannen oppakken:

Once digitised, these unique items will be available for full text search, download and reading through Google Books, as well as being searchable through the Library’s website and stored in perpetuity within the Library’s digital archive.
Researchers, students and other users of the Library will be able to view historical items from anywhere in the world as well as copy, share and manipulate text for non-commercial purposes.

Vooral over dat laatste zinnetje ontstond bijna meteen onrust. Glyn Moody schreef op zijn weblog:

But hang on: these are materials that are in the public domain; public domain means that anyone can do anything with them - including commercial applications. So this condition of "non-commercial purposes" means one thing, and one thing only: although the texts themselves are public domain, the digitised texts are not (otherwise it would be impossible to impose the non-commercial clause).
In other words, far from helping to make knowledge freely accessible to all and sundry, the British Library is actually enclosing the knowledge commons that rightfully belongs to humankind as a whole, by claiming a new copyright term for the digitised versions. Call me ungrateful, but that's a gift I can do without.
[...]
But what worries me is that accepting this accepts the principle that a major institution can take public domain material and take it out of the public domain in this way as a "quid pro quo": this is about principles.

Lees vooral ook de reacties.

Hoe zat dat nu ook alweer met die samenwerking tussen de KB en Google?

Overigens, de NRC schreef gisteravond dat Google en BL hebben afgesproken dat Google ALLE boeken en tijdschrijften van de BL (respectievelijk 14 miljoen en 1 miljoen) zal digitaliseren voor 2020. Maar dat lijkt me niet helemaal correct.

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Metadata, digitalisering en Google Books