I don’t know about your library, but my libraries in California are clos. I can’t get any books out of even the University of California Berkeley Library at this point, the whole campus is clos, and so while I haven’t been using the Open Library for my research purposes because they don’t have the books in it that I ne, I do think that that it’s just a heartless, tragic thing that this lawsuit is really trying to stop a very positive thing that Internet Archive has been doing.
I’m one of the legal scholars who has endors the controll digital lending statement. I think that even under some second circuit opinions, one can say that the Open Library has actually a utility-enhancing transformative use. It’s certainly nonprofit, it’s ucational, and it promotes literacy and many, many positive things. I think that the idea that lending a book is illegal is just wrong.
I would actually like to point out that in Germany, where copyright laws are generally stronger than in the Unit States, that the Darmstadt Technical University was able to succe in its non-infringement claim for digitizing a book, and here’s the important point: just because the publisher want to license an ebook to that library, the Court of Justice of the European Union said it’s not an infringement for the library to actually digitize one of its own books and make that book available to the public. So if that’s true in Germany, I think it should be true in the US as well.
About the speaker:
Pamela Samuelson is the Richard M. Sherman Distinguish Professor of Law and Information at the University of California, Berkeley. She is recogniz as a pioneer in digital copyright law, intellectual property, cyberlaw and information policy. Since 1996, she has held a joint appointment at Berkeley Law School and UC Berkeley’s School of Information. Samuelson is a director of the internationally-renowne Berke
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