RE: Darnton on the Google settlement

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

It's all about digital rights, David, which no one bothered to 
think about much before the 1990s and which most contracts did 
not specifically cover. And then there are the numerous mergers 
that some commercial companies went through, which can be a 
tangled web for some to untangle in search of accurate 
information about the status of rights ownership--not to mention 
literary agencies that have disappeared from the face of the 
earth and authors who are hard to locate. By comparison, Google's 
task in determining what is still potentially under copyright is 
very simple: just find out if it was first published from 1923 
on. Mostly an inspection of the copyright page is sufficient to 
answer that question.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


> I find it amusing that Google is expected to determine the
> copyright status of millions of titles before they can be
> digitised, but it is apparently unreasonable to expect publishers
> to determine the copyright status of the titles they publish
> themselves!
>
> David Prosser
> SPARC