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U of Michigan and Amazon To Offer 400,000 OOP Books
eldavojohn writes "Four hundred thousand rare, out of print books may soon be available for purchase ranging anywhere from $10 to $45 apiece. The article lists a rare Florence Nightingale book on Nursing which normally sells for thousands due to its rarity. The [University of Michigan] librarian, Mr. Courant said, 'The agreement enables us to increase access to public domain books and other publications that have been digitised. We are very excited to be offering this service as a new way to increase access to the rich collections of the university library.' The University of Michigan has a library where Google is scanning rare books and was the aim of heavy criticism. (Some of the Google-scanned books are to be sold on Amazon.) How the authors guild and publishers react to Amazon's Surge offering softcover reprints of out of print books remains to be seen."
Wonderful! So that means that Ann Coulter's and Rush Limbaugh's books -- I mean, drivel -- is likely to become immensely popular in about 100 years, after they've all died! So we'll have a whole new breed of conservatives in the 22nd century combing the amazing wisdom of Rush, the Great Philosopher! He'll become like, the next Socrates, or something. I guess I need to find some Hemlock,... ;-)
His citation is that he's an idiot who knows nothing of copyright law. The facts of his care are "I made up everything off the top of my head." You, who straightforwardly disclaims with IANAL, are closer to being a lawyer than this Hungus guy. Were I not in the middle of studying for the bar (starts in five days), I would explain better. No doubt someone else here will, but as there is no response to your post, I'll make a very brief explanation without any links. With my input, though, finding links should be trivial even for a non-lawyer.
1. things in the public domain, no matter how many copies there are, remain in the public domain
2. you can copy anything in the public domain with impunity from infringement lawsuits
3. if someone makes a copy and infuses in that copy some new, even relatively trivial, amount of artistic expression, the copy is copyrightable, but only the added elements, not the original elements
4. it is very close to 100% likely that "putting a book in a scanner and hitting 'scan'" doesn't count as adding new artistic expression
5. thus, the copy has no copyright protection
6. thus, hungus is posting way beyond his pay grade
Beyond that, because the only newly copyrighted things are the added artistic elements and not the underlying public domain expression, you could look at the images and re-transcribe the original words with impunity.