Ars Technica: The Internet Archive is an online library known for pushing the boundaries of copyright law to promote public access to obscure works, including classic video games and historic images. Now the organization is taking advantage of a little-noticed provision of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act to publish complete copies of out-of-print books published between 1923 and 1941. The group hopes that the move will inspire other libraries to follow its lead, making hundreds of thousands of books from the mid-20th Century available for download.
3 comments:
This is so exciting! There are many costuming books that are amazing, but out of print, so there are very few floating around because once a costumer gets it, they will keep it forever. Costumers regularly talk about which books they hope to find at used bookstores and hopefully the bookseller won’t know what he has.
Books that are good resources become outrageously priced because of good old capitalism. The supply cannot increase for many out of print books because the author is deceased, the publishing house does not exist anymore, there is not enough demand to warrant publishing another whole batch, or a myriad of other things that could have happened between when the book was first published and now. So, this Internet Archive will be a great resource to many scholars and the world as a whole.
I love this idea. So many wonderful books that are out of print and not readily available could be scanned, archived, preserved, and distributed to a whole new generation. I love books, especially much older versions of books to see how and where some changes were made. The issues come up when trying to get a copy of a book that is out of print, especially for research. Often times, libraries will have 1 copy of an out of print book and then restrict how long a person can borrow it for or, as in the case of the Library of Congress, may not allow the book to be borrowed but only accessed in-house and during certain hours. This will also allow many books to be scanned that are fragile, rare, of a special subject, and the like. As a researcher in the performing arts, I love seeing books about how households were ran in the past, the history and design of objects, old catalogs, and so forth. I really hope this takes off and that companies like Disney don’t try to kill it. This is not about the mouse. This is about making sure that scholars and the general public have access to the works they need to complete research.
Copy right law has always been something that frustrates me because while I know that it is there to serve a good purpose and protect the developers of different ideas from having their material blatantly stolen, I often think that the length and scope of what's is protected can go overboard fast take for example the recent development of cheat leading uniforms being to be copyrighted and also the means that Disney will lobby to make sure that Mickey Mouse will never fall into the public domain it just seems a little heavy handed. So the hear that there is a group that is making accessible books, that while not necessarily in the public domain, that are exempted from the copyright lengthening by the Sunny Bono Act is kinda cool because it means that now those books which many may not have had easy access to now do. I just hope they do not step on to many toes in doing so.
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