The long tail gets longer:
The British Library today announced its first partnership with Google, under which Google will digitize 250,000 items from the library’s vast collection of work produced between 1700-1870.
Nevertheless, [a representative of the Library] expressed slight frustration that the project will not go beyond 1870: “What we really want is the 20th century, but we Europeans are often locked out of our own culture by copyright laws. So, for instance, the First World War poets, which are pre-1923 and therefore out of copyright in the USA, are still in copyright in Europe. There is an absurdity there.”
Nor, he noted, was the issue of copyright restricted to Europe: “Early adopters of digitization were American college libraries that got themselves in a bit of trouble with copyright. The 1870 date we’ve chosen is very conservative and none of the European libraries has released anything that is still in copyright. The idea of the British Library and things that are still in copyright is way too rich for our blood.” [Excerpted, emphasis added]
Read the full article @ Tech Europe - Wall Street Journal: Google to Make British Library Archive Available Online
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