This essay in the New York Times is an interesting read. It was written by Lewis Hyde from Kenyon College, where he’s a professor of creative writing. Hyde is also a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.
The essay is about Google Book Search with a focus on copyright and orphan works. Here’s one very small portion of the two page essay:
Orphan works are all those Brats whose copyrights are still active but whose parents cannot be found. There are millions of them out there, and they are gumming up the world of publishing. Suppose a publisher wants to print an anthology of 1930s magazine fiction. Copyright now lasts so long (a century in many cases) that the publisher must assume that there are rights holders for all those stories. Suppose that half the owners can’t be found. What should the publisher do? Its lawyers will advise abandoning the anthology: statutory damages for copyright infringement now stand between $750 and $150,000 per instance. Less hypothetically, when Carnegie Mellon University tried to digitize a collection of out-of-print books, one of every five turned out to be orphaned. When Cornell tried to post a collection of agricultural monographs online, half were orphans. The United States Holocaust Museum owns millions of pages of archival documents that it can neither publish nor digitize.
Of more than seven million works scanned by Google so far, four to five million appear to be orphaned.
Source: Sunday Book Review, New York Times
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on Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 and is filed under Digitization Projects, Information Industry, Intellectual Property.
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