“I am much more concerned that the distribution of these books may be restricted to Sony owners. These books are in the Public Domain, after all, and we — non-Sony owners — have as much a right to them as anyone else.

This is especially important because I have a moral issue with giving Sony any money. They have for too long been an active enemy of Freedom and a supporter of DRM, non-standard technology, rootkits, and the evil RIAA for me to condone giving them a cent of my money.”

Agreed. I have a Sony Reader and frankly it’s kinda interesting that I can download one of these books to my hardware.

But what really excites me is that these Google has done the initial OCR for all these public domain books. The true beauty of this is precisely that people can and will ignore Google’s guidelines and start making these books widely available.

For example, I’m very interested in the Free Thought movement of the 19th century, and suddenly there are hundreds of previously hard-to-find books in the public domain that I have already grabbed and plan to repost with some corrections to the OCR.

BTW, I assume any attempt for Google to convert its guidelines into a license would meet the same fate as Fox found itself with the Dastar decision.

Fox had a copyrighted World War II documentary. Dastar got a betamax copy, digitized just the documentary footage, and then repackaged that. Fox sued essentially trying to argue the point on a trademark issue and ultimately lost at the Supreme Court,

“Justice Antonin Scalia, writing in the decision, noted that the Court has said in the past that the Lanham Act “does not exist to reward manufacturers for their innovation in creating a particular device; that is the purpose of the patent law and its period of exclusivity,” and that, therefore, claims about authorship cannot be used as an end-run around the underlying philosophy of a time limit on exclusive ownership of a copyright or patent. Allowing such restrictions on a public domain work would, Scalia wrote, “create a species of mutant copyright law that limits the public’s “federal right to ‘copy and to use’” expired copyrights,” and would effectively create “a species of perpetual patent and copyright, which Congress may not do” according to Article One of the United States Constitution.”

Google may be able to restrict usage of the actual file it provides, but I doubt any court would uphold its right to restrict usage of the underlying text even where everyone agrees the underlying text was extracted wholly from Google’s epub files (which, since they lack DRM, aren’t covered by the DMCA).

Frankly, someone needs to get all 500,000 of those files and do the data export and get those on archive.org, etc., precisely to prevent Google at some point from adding DRM and more restrictive licensing terms.

In my book I’ve discussed this issue: Google is wonderfully mistaken on the issue of attempting to restrict rights to books in the public domain. They have neither the legal nor the moral right to do this. Their colossal scanning project, first seen as a glorious act of public service, is now tainted with the scent of self-service.

The reading public has waited long enough for these books to fall into the intellectual commons: Google’s act of extending this waiting period is un-Google-like.
I’ve also written that Google is a good company, and that in the near future, they will change this foolish policy.

We can hasten this change with an organized campaign to encourage Google to promote “universal access to all knowledge”. In other words, Google: Do the right thing. The beloved works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Goethe, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Lincoln, Melville and the rest are now *our* property — not yours.

Michael Pastore
50 Benefits of Ebooks

If you select “full view only”, this probably means works that are either public domain or Creative Commons, as the “limited preview” implies copyrighted works that you have to pay for. If you get a download link, you can probably assume no copyright.

The other method is to use the date range option. By only selecting books printed before 1923, you are guaranteed public domain works. This will not catch all public domain works, as some books printed after 1923 have fallen into the public domain.

Dover is known for taking public domain material, editing it in some way, adding some editorial content (usually minimal) and putting out a new, copyrighted edition. This “remixing” is allowed by law. If you strip out all of the added Dover content, you can do what you wish with the still public domain part.

Lots of publishers have been doing this type of thing for many years. There is nothing wrong with it, as long as they add something of their own to the original work. Taking a public domain work as is and claiming a new copyright is not kosher, however.

I understand Google not wanting others making a buck on their scanning of public domain works. As mentioned, they have taken steps to foil the automation of this process. However, if someone does make a buck using one or more Google scans, there is nothing legally or morally wrong with it. I suspect Google knows this better than I do.

For instance, this book, published in 1891, does not allow even a single preview page.

This may be the beta status acting up, but on a previous occasion, I tried a similar thing, and there was a copyright notice saying that I could not preview a Spanish dictionary from 1889 because “the Publisher of this book has not authorized it for preview”. As if the “Publisher['s]” grand children were not dead and buried.

Here is the page for Huck Finn. This book is unquestionably in the Public Domain. Where is the download button? At the very least, Google could provide a link to Project Gutenberg.

I understand that this is a commercial website, but I was under the impression that Google made money on advertising. The ads are all there. Let me download the book already. If I want it on paper, I will buy it.

Book publishers make much more apparently legal baseless threats than this. Consider the phrase “This book not licensed for sale outside of [insert country]“. Hello? First sale doctrine? If it is my book, I can sell it anywhere I want to anyone I want.

I am much more concerned that the distribution of these books may be restricted to Sony owners. These books are in the Public Domain, after all, and we — non-Sony owners — have as much a right to them as anyone else.

This is especially important because I have a moral issue with giving Sony any money. They have for too long been an active enemy of Freedom and a supporter of DRM, non-standard technology, rootkits, and the evil RIAA for me to condone giving them a cent of my money.

sony sucks.like.no.other

I am already incensed at Google for its Android Market. The idea that only approved handsets can access the apps is ridiculous. If they do this for books, too, I will start really believing Google is evil.

First, what John Gray said — even if they wanted too, Google wouldn’t have a leg to stand on with works that are truly in the public domain as all the 500,000 or so of these works appear to be.

Second, I didn’t get that impression at all from Google which mainly seems to be concerned about commercial exploitation of its dataset that would impose large traffic and computational costs.

This is what Google actually says in its *GUIDELINES* (I do agree that *if* this does/did constitute a licensing arrangement, it would be ridiculously onerous, but there’s nothing here that says “license”).

Usage guidelines

Google is proud to partner with libraries to digitize public domain materials and make them widely accessible. Public domain books belong
to the public and we are merely their custodians. Nevertheless, this work is expensive, so in order to keep providing this resource, we have taken steps to prevent abuse by commercial parties, including placing technical restrictions on automated querying.

We also ask that you:

Make non-commercial use of the files: We designed Google Book Search for use by individuals, and we request that you use these files for personal, non-commercial purposes.

Refrain from automated querying: Do not send automated queries of any sort to Google’s system: If you are conducting research on machine translation, optical character recognition or other areas where access to a large amount of text is helpful, please contact us. We encourage the use of public domain materials for these purposes and may be able to help.

Maintain attribution: The Google “watermark” you see on each file is essential for informing people about this project and helping them find additional materials through Google Book Search. Please do not remove it.

Keep it legal: Whatever your use, remember that you are responsible for ensuring that what you are doing is legal. Do not assume that just because we believe a book is in the public domain for users in the United States, that the work is also in the public domain for users in other countries. Whether a book is still in copyright varies from country to country, and we can’t offer guidance on whether any
specific use of any specific book is allowed. Please do not assume that a book’s appearance in Google Book Search means it can be used in any manner anywhere in the world. Copyright infringement liability can be quite severe.