This is a Digital age. We expect everything to be within our reach with the blink of an eye. Why books should be left behind. The new age digital books and the digital book hosting web portals have made it easier and quite accessible to reach the rarest available books with a click. But in the process, there is a possibility that the Author's moral rights and copyrights are put at stake. In a recent case, a group of International Authors have sued five US universities for copyright violations and unauthorized dissemination of digital books. The plaintiffs include the Author's Guild, Australian Society of Authors, UNEQ and other individual authors. The lawsuits have been filed against universities of Michigan, California, Wisconsin, Indiana and Cornell respectively. The plaintiffs argued that these universities obtained unauthorized scans of 7 million Copyright protected books from Google and assembled the information in a digital repository called Hathi Trust, which holds about 9,596,083 total volumes of digitized books.
The plaintiff's complaint is made against digitization, archiving and copying which makes it a massive infringement of copyrights. On the other hand, this lawsuit could bring a severe blow to Hathi Trust's Orphan Works Project . The Orphan Works Project aims at making full- text versions of out-of-print copyrighted works available in the repository when their rights holders cannot be found or contacted. Currently around 148 potential orphan works on the HathiTrust are out-of-print titles published between 1923 and 1963.
The issue is a serious one and raises different thoughts. While proponents consider such digital book repositories as a useful resource for the students worldwide but on the contrary, it is highly unacceptable for the authors to put an orphan tag to their respective works. The situation is perplex and the pros and cons appear to be in equal proportions.Until then, we have to wait and see the outcomes in this case.
( Image by Zsuzsanna Kilian)
