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

Tue Jun 21 16:45:46 UTC 2011

On 21 June 2011 16:43,  <dingodog at fastmail.fm> wrote:
> I cannot believe that googlebooks imposed to hathitrust to NOT ALLOW
> DOWNLOAD OF PUBLIC DOMAIN TO EVERYBODY

Yes, I can understand your surprise. At the same time let's avoid caps
if we can :-) (it equates to 'shouting' in emails ...)

> it is no matter of *BULK DOWNLOAD*. There are so many ways to avoid BULK
> DOWNLOAD (a simple recaptcha, for instance)
>
> in fact, if Googlebooks imposed to Hathitrust to give not access to FULL
> PDF books, why hathitrust gives access to PAYING MEMBERS INSTITUTIONS?
>
> it sounds to me like a kind of SPECULATION, made restricting PUBLIC
> DOMAIN MATERIAL access only to people paying

Right. At the same time I think, in general it is best to be
encouraging rather than too critical. It is costly to digitize stuff
including public domain material. I would of course prefer all
digitized public domain material to be made openly available but I
understand people operate under constraints, and that HathiTrust in
particular is likely doing its best to both sustain their digitization
programme and make material available :-)

Rufus

> I would to read a googlebooks statement in order to clarify this
> question
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