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

Re: Anonymous Comments to the Writer Beware Blog

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

The HathiTrust begins to look to me like something that was put together by members of the various colleges' administrations, who didn't bother to ask anyone who was actually knowledgeable on their faculties to help. As has been pointed out, librarians as a class are not idiots, and even university librarians have to deal with trade books.

The letter from Scholarly Communications Officer (wow, is that a title or what?) Dr. Smith chastising Mr. Salamanca for protecting his copyright is just illustrative of everything that makes this argument so...surreal. Of course an author is going to protect their rights, and to scold Mr. Salamanca for choosing to revert his rights, as if it were somehow wrong for him to have done so...is, from my perspective beyond belief.

Also, the assertion that the ability of an author to revert his rights in the 50s was "unusual" is just...bizarre.

So, yeah, clearly, SCO Dr. Smith, at least, didn't talk to anybody who knew something about his topic.