British Library Encloses the Public Domain

There's considerable excitement about an announcement from the British Library and Google detailing a wonderful gift to the world:

The British Library and Google today announced a partnership to digitise 250,000 out-of-copyright books from the Library’s collections. Opening up access to one of the greatest collections of books in the world, this demonstrates the Library’s commitment, as stated in its 2020 Vision, to increase access to anyone who wants to do research.

Selected by the British Library and digitised by Google, both organisations will work in partnership over the coming years to deliver this content free through Google Books (http://books.google.co.uk) and the British Library’s website (www.bl.uk). Google will cover all digitisation costs.

Isn't that just swell? Vast quantities of fascinating books in the public domain are being made "available to all", as the press release trumpets:

This project will digitise a huge range of printed books, pamphlets and periodicals dated 1700 to 1870, the period that saw the French and Industrial Revolutions, The Battle of Trafalgar and the Crimean War, the invention of rail travel and of the telegraph, the beginning of UK income tax, and the end of slavery. It will include material in a variety of major European languages, and will focus on books that are not yet freely available in digital form online.

Freely available, too... But, er, exactly *how* freely available?

Once digitised, these unique items will be available for full text search, download and reading through Google Books, as well as being searchable through the Library’s website and stored in perpetuity within the Library’s digital archive.

Fab, and....?

Researchers, students and other users of the Library will be able to view historical items from anywhere in the world as well as copy, share and manipulate text for non-commercial purposes.

But hang on: these are materials that are in the public domain; public domain means that anyone can do anything with them - including commercial applications. So this condition of "non-commercial purposes" means one thing, and one thing only: although the texts themselves are public domain, the digitised texts are not (otherwise it would be impossible to impose the non-commercial clause).

In other words, far from helping to make knowledge freely accessible to all and sundry, the British Library is actually enclosing the knowledge commons that rightfully belongs to humankind as a whole, by claiming a new copyright term for the digitised versions. Call me ungrateful, but that's a gift I can do without.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca.

Google Books: A Cautionary Tale

Google Books is important:

the Google Project has, however unintentionally, made not only conventional libraries themselves, but other projects digitizing cultural artifacts appear inept or inadequate. Project Gutenberg and its 17,000 books in ascii appear insignificant and superfluous beside the millions of books that Google is contemplating. So do most scanning projects by conventional libraries. As a consequence of the assumed superiority of Google’s approach, therefore, it is highly unlikely that either the funds or the energies for an alternative project of similar magnitude will become available, nor are the libraries who are lending their books (at significant costs to their funds, their books, and their users) likely to undertake such an effort a second time. With each scanned page, Google Books’ Library Project, by its quantity if not necessarily by its quality, makes the possibility of a better alternative unlikely. The Project may then become the library of the future, whatever its quality, by default. So it does seems important to probe what kind of quality Google Book Project might present to an ordinary user that Google envisages wanting to find a book.

But also unsatisfactory:

The Google Books Project is no doubt an important, in many ways invaluable, project. It is also, on the brief evidence given here, a highly problematic one. Relying on the power of its search tools, Google has ignored elemental metadata, such as volume numbers. The quality of its scanning (and so we may presume its searching) is at times completely inadequate. The editions offered (by search or by sale) are, at best, regrettable.

Rather worrying. (Via O'Reilly Radar.)