Noticed (for the second time now) a book on Google Books that seems like it should be in the public domain (and thus available full view), but isn't.
Does anyone know how to contact someone at Google about specific works that seem like they should be available in full view? Googling 'google books
customer service' turns up nothing.
FWIW the two volumes in question are:
'The Pyrolysis of Carbon Compounds' by Charles Dewitt Hurd (1929... should be old enough to be out of copyright) and
'The Great Art of Artillery' by Casimir Simienowicz (1729, ffs!).
The latter was reprinted in 1971, which might explain misclassification of the original, but I have no idea why the former would not be in full view.
(ecchh, mispost to wrong forum. Could a mod please move this to Legal and Societal, or Whimsy if that's not the right place either?).
[Edited on 3-5-2011 by bbartlog]Polverone - 3-5-2011 at 15:19
Google Books is not very proactive about making public domain works visible to the public.
Works that were published in the USA before 1923 are in the public domain. Works published outside the USA are protected even further back; I think
the general cutoff year is something like 1909. If a work was published after 1963, there is basically no hope that it is in the public domain unless
the copyright holder explicitly frees it, and Disney lobbyists will ensure that this is as true 50 years from now as it is today.
Between 1923 and 1963, works published in the USA had to be registered for renewal or they fell into the public domain. There is a complete list available of works renewed between 1923 and 1963. If the work you're interested in was published in the USA in those years, and it
is not on the renewal list, it is in the public domain.
As I said at the beginning, though, Google is not very aggressive about opening up the public domain. Google rarely if ever makes post-1923 content
freely available even if it is in the public domain. This is also an annoyance with government reports and publications, the vast majority of which
are public-domain but frequently misclassified by Google.
The HathiTrust is a consortium of libraries participating in Google Books and other book digitization efforts. They are better about putting material
in public view when it is in the public domain. They show thousands of post-1923 books that Google has scanned but elected not to display in full.
Unfortunately, there are two additional major complications with HathiTrust:
1) Their online reader interface is painfully slow and crude compared with the Google Books interface or even the one on archive.org.
2) They don't provide an easy way to download complete public-domain works for offline reading, searching, translation, etc. They offer an API, which
I have used to create HathiHelper for the purpose of retrieving full public-domain books, but apparently Google has a proprietary attitude toward their scans of public
domain books. Google requires their partners to take measures to discourage full-copy downloading. This means that in the future HathiTrust may
deliberately take steps to break HathiHelper or similar tools. It strikes me as absurd to police access to freely visible copies of public domain
works, doubly so since Google Books itself offers convenient full-PDF download of public domain works, but I have heard directly from a librarian
involved with HathiTrust that Google imposes this requirement on its partners.
HathiTrust is more aggressive than Google about opening up public-domain materials for easy access, but even they appear to quietly enforce
protections beyond what the law requires. If you look at the copyright renewals list linked to above you'll see that (e.g.) the American Chemical
Society didn't start registering renewals for its journals until 1951. There should be about 28 years of ACS publications after 1923 in the public
domain. If you look at a popular journal such as Chemical Reviews, you'll see that HathiTrust has copies of many volumes in this 1923-1951 time window
but shows none of them. It could be coincidence, but Chemical Reviews is hardly an obscure publication. I think that HathiTrust is placating academic
publishers by restricting access to public domain works that publishers want to keep selling (or it could even be that this restriction is dictated by
Google, probably for the same underlying reasons).
EDIT: It appears that Hathitrust is adding better viewing tools, so one of my complaints above is blunted. It is also worth noting that HathiTrust
makes The Pyrolysis of Carbon Compounds freely available. Further, it appears that you can now download full PDFs of public domain works but only if you
have an account with a partner academic institution. Students at other schools and the general public are still out of luck.
[Edited on 5-3-2011 by Polverone]bbartlog - 4-5-2011 at 05:45
Thanks Polverone. Maybe I'll make Hathitrust my first stop going forward.food - 4-5-2011 at 15:50
