Brewster Kahle: Google’s Twisted Logic on Orphan Books

Yesterday, Google’s Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt were in New York City, holding court with a handful of reporters on all things Google. The issue of Google Books came up quickly, and of course, they had a lot to say about the topic.

In particular, Brin made some outlandish claims about orphan books, including the assertion that “the companies that are making objections about out of print books are doing nothing for out of print books…”.

This caught the attention of Brewster Kahle, the co-founder of the Internet Archive (which is a member of the Open Book Alliance.) Unsurprisingly, Brewster took umbrage with this latest salvo of nonsense from Google, and penned a response on the Open Content Alliance blog.

In Brewster’s words…

“There are around 400 objections to the settlement objecting to Google’s treatment of out-of-print books– companies, libraries and even countries. And many of us are objecting because we have been working together for years on the mass scanning of out-of-print books– and have worked to get books online for far longer than Google– and Google’s “settlement” could hurt our efforts. A major part of our efforts have concentrated on changing the law so everyone would benefit.

“The Internet Archive’s effort to free “orphan works” (a name that I coined in the books context for when the rightsowner is unknown or does not negotiate for use of the work), had been an active project for years before Google announced they were scanning library books. As early as 2002 the Archive was participating in the Million Books project when we acquired a hundred thousand books for scanning. Because many of these books wound up being orphans, their digitization was partial and significantly delayed. Today, the Million Books project holds over 1.4 million books that have been scanned at public expense, but are not publicly viewable because of the lack of clarity on orphan works.”