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

Tue Jun 21 19:55:20 UTC 2011

Rufus Pollock, you should be ashamed of yourself in such company,
to be guilty of addressing the FORM of someone's comments, BEFORE
addressing the CONTENT.

It degrades the entire process of communication, and yourself, to
the point where if you insist on doing this you would become like
"the little boy who cried WOLF!" and no one will even read emails
with your name at the top.

I would LIKE to think just mentioning this once to you sufficient
that no would will have to shout YOU down for trying to shoutdown
someone else while pretending you are NOT shouting.

I'm sure you are most likely too young to remember those earliest
Internet days when ALL communications were in CAPS, because lower
case wasn't possible in 6 bit ASCII.

However, those who came upon the scene at later dates have little
or no right to tell those who were already there for years how to
do what was already being done quite well without their help.

If you really think you should pursue this further, I suggest the
time spent reading up on the fiasco failures of "Netiquette," and
those sophists who tried to foist it upon the rest of us, before,
well before, contining on this ill advised course of reaction.

I've been doing email for 40 years now, since well before it came
to be CALLED email, or the ARPANet was called the Internet, and I
take every opportunity to save the Internet from those like you.

Hopefully enough has been said here, on both sides, that nothing,
at least here, need be again on this subject.

Meanwhile, perhaps you [plural] would enjoy downloading from some
6 to 7 million potential free downloads starting July 4!!!

Details below.

Michael S. Hart
Founder
Project Gutenberg,
Inventor of eBooks
Co-Founder
The World eBook Fair

6.55 MILLION FREE eBOOKS!
July 4 through August 4 @
http://worldebookfair.org
[Not Subtracting Duplicates]

On Tue, 21 Jun 2011, Rufus Pollock wrote:

> 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
> > --
> >
> >  dingodog at fastmail.fm
> >
> > --
> > http://www.fastmail.fm - Choose from over 50 domains or use your own
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > pd-discuss mailing list
> > pd-discuss at lists.okfn.org
> > http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/pd-discuss
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Co-Founder, Open Knowledge Foundation
> Promoting Open Knowledge in a Digital Age
> http://www.okfn.org/ - http://blog.okfn.org/
>
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