Carcharoth wrote:
The point here is that the availability of PD items
(the actual items
themselves, not the scans or copies of them) varies. There are also
quality control and provenance issues as well. What would you prefer?
A quality scan from a respected museum that has confirmed the
provenance of an item and that it is genuine and not a fake, or a
poor-quality scan from Joe Blogs who has found stuff in a second-hand
bookshop and has no weight of authority behind him to confirm that the
scan or the object are genuine?
The usual solution to that is to point to the museum/library/archive
image as a way to verify the self-created image (similar to how people
point to Google Books now to verify books they are using as
references). But what if there is no museum/library/archive image?
I don't worry too much about book scans. I suppose that a determined
person could fake these if he had good reason to be so motivated, but
those circumstances would be a definite exception. Joe Blogs's scans
will very often be of poor quality, but where only text is concerned are
probably suitable to the intended purpose. Companies like Google are
getting involved because it's too much for limited library budgets, and
volunteer help is probably not reliable enough to handle such a huge
mindless task. There are further access problems when we are dealing
with fragile material on acidic paper. Books that have come out in
multiple editions present a lot of additional problems about what it
means to be a genuine.version.
I view the public domain as a trust with the general public as the
beneficiary. It is the underlying rationale behind the public ownership
of US government copyrights, and to free admission to national museums
in Washington: the taxpayer already paid for all this with his taxes, so
why should he pay again to see it and use it where possible.
Pointing to Google Books is one thing when our usage does not involve
changing the material. If we want to do more with it like producing
derivatives, we need to host it elsewhere.
This makes me wonder if there is a place at the bailout trough for
rebuilding the intellectual infrastructure. ;-)
Ec