[pd-discuss] Hathitrust locks public domain books; amasses scans from others, and gives full access only to partners members

Tue Jun 21 14:04:02 UTC 2011

your point of view (satisfied) is an hathitrust  member's point of view,
while a point of view of non-member can be only negative towards
hathitrust. Do you would have the same point of view if non-member?
obviously not.

it is very questionable the logic that if you are not affiliate to a
member partnered with hathitrust you cannot fully access to PUBLIC
DOMAIN BOOKS SCANNED BY OTHERS!

I would have a better opinion of hathitrust without their option for
sell hard copies of digitized books

the facts are these:

anyone can FULLY access to books digitized by UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, in
public domain

but these books are only an infinitesimal part of books in hathitrust 

the greatest quota is constituted by books scanned by google (that
strangely you cannot download if you are not member of partnered
institution)

why this limitation? We can do some hypothesis: 

limiting number of people having full access gives two advantages to
hathitrust

- taking control of access
- reducing RISK that someone provided of civic conscience starts to
*liberate* ALL public domain books from hathitrust jail, and if this
happens, identify more easily, while no lawsuit it is possible, I think,
since googlebooks terms say that googlebooks scans are freely
re-hostable maintaining the googlebooks watermark

but this easily becomes then a way to make money with books scanned by
other and this is very questionable and not ethical 

googlebooks does not care about investigation on public domain status of
scanned books; many scans in full view in hathitrust are in snippet view
in googlebooks, due to this lacking of investigation, so, you cannot
affirm that if a books is not accessible in hathitrust you can download
from googlebooks, many times this is not true

Hathitrust has this dark side that is not often revealed to public

On Tue, 21 Jun 2011 09:20 -0400, "John Mark Ockerbloom"
<ockerblo at pobox.upenn.edu> wrote:
> On 06/20/2011 03:17 PM, dingodog at fastmail.fm wrote:
> > but... why hathitrust has this evil behavior? Why it does not allows
> > full access to PUBLIC DOMAIN BOOKS scanned by others to be freely read?
> > (while hathitrust lock these books)
> 
> While I think it's fine to question the policies of Hathi Trust (or any
> other digital library project), I have to say that the bit above sounds a
> lot like "How dare they offer us free ice cream when those that give
> financial
> support get banana splits!"
> 
> Last I checked, Hathi does not assert ownership rights over either
> its content or its metadata.  You can do whatever you want with what you
> download or view at their site, with the only restrictions
> being those imposed by the third parties that own copyrights to some
> of the books Hathi offers free access to.  Hathi makes it clear what
> rights and
> restrictions apply to different kinds of books, and their statements at
> 
> http://www.hathitrust.org/access_use
> 
> do not add any additional legal constraints. They are willing to open up
> access
> to limited-search books if they can be shown to be out of copyright (and
> indeed, have researched copyrights and opened up thousands of volumes
> scanned
> by Google that Google itself has not.)  And they'll tell you where to
> find the original book they scanned, if you want to scan it again
> and offer a nicer version.  (Or, if the book is scanned by Google,
> they'll tell you that, and you can see if Google offers a free PDF
> on their own site.)
> 
> Hathi Trust is an organization dedicated to preserving and providing
> access to the cultural record.  This costs money to do (costs that are
> paid, in part, by the library I work for).  To ensure financial support
> over the long term, they have decided to go with a "freemium" business
> model,
> where everyone gets a basic level of access for free (which includes
> readable access to all the pages of their public domain books online),
> and supporters get enhanced access.
> 
> If you think that they should provide more free
> access, you're welcome to advocate that they do that.  It'll help if you
> can make a convincing case that doing so will help and not hurt their
> ability to sustain their preservation operations.  Or, if you think you
> can do better than Hathi, you're welcome to offer better access to public
> domain content you acquire from them or others.  But I don't see how
> it helps the cause of public access when folks who go a certain distance
> in
> freely offering content get blamed and labeled "evil" when they don't go
> as far as some would prefer.
> 
> John Mark Ockerbloom
> (Note: I do not speak for Hathi Trust. While my library is a member,
>   the opinions above are solely my own.)
> 
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> 
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