One of the great tasks facing humanity today is digitizing the world’s books and liberating the huge stores of knowledge they contain. The technology is there … but the legal framework is struggling to keep up. That can be seen in the continuing uncertainty hovering over Google’s massive book scanning project. It can also be observed in some recent digitization projects like Cambridge University’s Digital Library. …
This current trend to limit access to digitized versions of public domain materials is a real betrayal of the original mission of public libraries like the British Library. These made possible the opening up knowledge to huge numbers of ordinary people who otherwise would never been able to access these materials. Today’s massive digitization projects, which ought to be building on and extending that great tradition, are actually reversing it by seeking to take texts out of the public domain and charge for access to them. That’s not just a shame, it’s a scandal.
Ganzer Artikel: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111227/02494617196/great-digitization-great-betrayal.shtml