Tuesday 13 September 2011

Googleright exceptions

The Authors Guild, who sued Google for scanning in-copyright books back in 2005 (a suit that is still pending), are now suing the libraries that allowed Google to scan their collections. Google has given the libraries copies of their scans and the libraries have since pooled them in the HathiTrust Digital Library. Now the HathiTrust is on the point of permitting unlimited downloads of those works it deems to be ‘orphans’. Press release here.

The UK government, meanwhile, is expected to start putting pressure on search engines, advertisers and credit card companies to take ‘reasonable steps’ to ‘make life more difficult’ for sites that openly flout copyright. See the FT report here for further details.

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