[tei-council] PR for TEI in Google Books (was Re: some brief reports to save time during our upcoming conf call)

[Kevin Hawkins]

While Google might plan to prepare TEI documents of in-copyright books 
scanned by their partners (to give back to the partners along with page 
images and OCR), I am concerned with the deployment of code to 
books.google.com for public-domain titles.  This is what the general 
public would see.

Here is a title that I believe everyone (even those outside of the US) 
can see in full:

http://books.google.com/books?id=7nsCAAAAQAAJ

If you click "Preview this book" and then click the gear icon in the 
upper right, you can choose to "Download PDF".  They PDF that is 
generated has a page at the front which explains a bit about it and asks 
(though does not require) that you use it for non-commercial purposes. 
I expect that Google would do the same for a TEI document.

As Gabby said, the work itself is in the public domain, and in the US 
you can't receive copyright protection for a reproduction of a 
public-domain work that doesn't involve new creative work.  While 
reprints of public domain titles can sometimes receive copyright 
protection in some other countries, I doubt Google would assert such 
rights in specific countries.

In short, we're talking about Google releasing these TEI documents into 
the public domain.

On 3/5/12 5:57 AM, Lou Burnard wrote:
> I think Kevin did give us this impression during the teleconf. Certainly
> that's what the minutes (which I sent to James last night) say!
>
> I suspect my esteemed colleague  Rahtz is trolling on the use of the
> phrase "public domain"
>
> On 05/03/12 10:54, Gabriel Bodard wrote:
>> Well, the texts themselves are public domain. Do we know what license
>> Google normally attach to otherwise PD texts that they release? (E.g.
>> page scans.) I wonder what would be the point of releasing TEI versions
>> of texts without licensing them for some kind of re-use...?
>>
>> Kevin, any insight on this? Any value in pushing in this direction?
>>
>> G
>>
>> On 2012-03-05 10:50, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
>>>
>>> On 5 Mar 2012, at 10:43, Gabriel Bodard wrote:
>>>
>>>> really really bad (or contains bad OCR), the fact that TEI is a format
>>>> chosen to encode many many thousands of public domain texts
>>>
>>> it would really be a big deal if Google released these texts
>>> as public domain…. but I don't think thats what you mean :-}
>>>
>>> --
>>> Stormageddon Rahtz
>>> Head of Information and Support Group
>>> Oxford University Computing Services
>>> 13 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6NN. Phone +44 1865 283431
>>>
>>> Sólo le pido a Dios
>>> que el futuro no me sea indiferente
>>>
>>
>