Again with the “orphan” works

[rolanni]

So, back in middish-September, Teh Intertubes (and we here in this blog entry, too) had a talk about a buncha university libraries calling themselves HathiTrust, which had just sort of decided that copyright was really inconvenient, and digitized a hundred or so books that, in the sole opinion of HathiTrust were “orphaned.”  The Authors Guild pretty quickly filed a lawsuit against the trust, and took a lot of heat out there on Teh Intertubes (we here were polite, though we did not always agree)  for Being Mean to libraries.  Words like “anti-intellectual,” and “anti-education” were tossed about, with a fair number of folk sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling laLAlaLALA at the top of their typing speed.

So, the libraries maintained that they had used “due diligence” in searching for the rights holders of the books they coveted, and the Authors Guild said, If you used due diligence how could you have  missed finding this guy who we found in a four-second Google Search, and he’s plenty mad at you for digitizing his book without asking — or paying?

Well…it turns out that the libraries, being, yanno academic libraries, Just Naturally Assumed that the rights holders would be. . .

drum roll, please

. . .the publishers.

*bangs head on desk*

Read all about it, and more.

Originally published at Sharon Lee, Writer. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[mbarker.livejournal.com]

I hate to say it, but I can almost guess that there was a committee involved. And there is something magical about a committee. Given 10 people, any of whom is sharp, the dynamics of the committee can all too easily result in group idiocy. Not always, and there are plenty of teams that do good work, but... I think one of the prerequisites for group idiocy is that everyone assumes that someone else is going to check into that. That guy "somebody" just plain doesn't do good work.

Yeah. Head to desk, palm to face, and all those expressions of "I can't believe it."

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

It does strike me as something put together by the various Administrations without input from anybody with...Real World Experience.