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

Tue Jun 21 15:19:57 UTC 2011

On 06/21/2011 10:04 AM, dingodog at fastmail.fm wrote:
> 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?

Actually, my access to date has been "non-member"; we just joined,
and haven't yet set up the infrastructure needed to authenticate users as
belonging to a member institution.  Yet I've still been happy with the service,
and have used it a fair bit over the last year.

 > 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

On closer examination, it looks like you can also download PDFs of
University of California volumes not digitized by Google (I just downloaded
_A Description of Millenium Hall_ from them without signing in).
It may well be that you can download PDFs from public-domain, non-Google
scans in general.  In which case my description of Hathi's business model
was in fact not fully accurate; I believe that Google itself limits the ability
of contracted libraries to offer bulk downloads to all comers.
See, e.g., the Google-Michigan digitization agreement at

http://www.lib.umich.edu/michigan-digitization-project/university-michigan-and-google-amended-digitization-agreement

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

Well, the Open Knowledge Definition folks might argue with that.
One of the OKD's explicit goals (and that of the Open Source movement too) is
to *allow* people to make money from other people's work, and to discourage
"noncommercial use" restrictions.  (Some of the Hathi Trust books do
have such restrictions, but not by Hathi's choice, as far as I can tell.)
There are good reasons for allowing such commercial use which have been
discussed on OKF forums before, and I won't rehash them here.

John