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Washington, DC-In a letter to the chairmen of the House and
Senate Judiciary subcommittees overseeing intellectual property
issues, the nation's oldest consumer advocacy group raised
concerns about a forthcoming ambitious effort to catalogue the
entire collections of four major American libraries. The letter,
signed by National Consumers League President Linda Golodner,
acknowledges the tremendous potential value in Google Inc.'s
bold vision for the new initiative, in which the complete
collection of works at the university libraries of Stanford,
Michigan, and Harvard, and of the New York Public Library, would
be scanned and made available electronically to the public. The
Washington-based advocacy group warned, however, that the
project, which will resume scanning on November 1, 2005 poses
dramatic threats to the principle of copyrights; fairness to
authors; and cultural selectivity, exclusion, and censorship.
Due to the fact that a significant portion of the volumes in the
collections remain under copyright, having been written after
1923 and not legally considered a matter of public domain, the
advocacy group warned that clearly, Google should be required to
obtain appropriate rights before reproducing the works of
others. Google's current plan would require authors to "opt-out"
of its program, which places and inappropriate burden on
copyright holders. This legal issue, similar to that faced by
LexisNexis in a 2001 Supreme Court case, obviates the fact that
Google holds the burden of obtaining permission, argued NCL. An
opt-out system for authors who do not wish to give permission is
simply not acceptable.
"We do not doubt Google's good intentions," wrote Golodner. "But
any database which represents itself as being a 'full' or
'complete' record of American culture as reflected in the
collections of four major research libraries must, in fact, be
complete. The sheer scope and cumbersome nature of the project
may force Google to cut corners at some point, raising
inevitable questions. To the extent that Google finds itself
drawing lines for inclusion or exclusion based even indirectly
on content—style, political slant, format, author, and so on—it
makes itself a censor of our history and culture."
Golodner urged Congress to consider holding public hearings on
this issue of great public, legal, and cultural significance.
Click to see
copy of
the letters
Honorable Lamar S.
Smith, Chairman, Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and
Intellectual Property
Senator Orrin Hatch,
Chairman, Subcommittee on Intellectual Property |
