First, they have questioned whether the primary responsibility for digitally archiving the worlds books should be allowed to fall to a commercial company. ③In a recent essay in the New York Review of Books, Robert Darnton, the head of Harvard Universitys library, argued that because such books are a common resource - the possession of us all - only public, not-for-profit bodies should be given the power to control them.
The second, related criticism is that Googles scanning of books is actually illegal. This allegation has led to Google becoming mired in a legal battle whose scope and complexity makes the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case in Bleak House look straightforward.
④At its centre, however, is one simple issue: that of copyright. The inconvenient fact about most books, to which Google has arguably paid insufficient attention, is that they are protected by copyright. Copyright laws differ from country to country, but in general protection extends for the duration of an authors life and for a substantial period afterwards, thus allowing the authors heirs to benefit. This means, of course, that almost all of the books published in the 20th century are still under copyright - and last century saw more books published than in all previous centuries combined. Of the roughly 40 million books in US libraries, for example, an estimated 32 million are in copyright. Of these, some 27 million are out of print.
Outside the US, Google has made sure only to scan books that are out of copyright and thus in the public domain .
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