Greg Newby writes:
On Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 08:23:47PM -0600, Bruce Albrecht wrote:
Greg Newby writes:
On Wed, Mar 01, 2006 at 09:57:11AM -0600, Bruce Albrecht wrote:
... How many PD books have you found in Google Book Search that were not visible? Did you report them to Google? If not, some of the blame falls on _your_ shoulders.
How is such notification done?
Well, when I've been doing book searches at Google, and it comes up with a book that doesn't say that it was provided by a publisher, and the book information claims it was copyrighted before 1923, or I can find the copyright in a snippet, I use Google's feeback link to report that the book is incorrectly flagged as being in copyright so that they will fix the status. In one case, they fixed it after a 4-5 email exchange. In other cases, they simply told me that they were aware that some books were incorrectly identified as in copyright.
Do they consider 1923 as a cutoff date (per US law)? Or do they look to 1868 or something similar as a cutoff, as an attempt to only say "public domain" if it's defensibly for the entire world?
I don't know about other countries, as I am in the US. This week, I tried to follow up on a book published in 1914 in England (but probably missing an explicit copyright), but it's hard to tell because Google doesn't display full sized title and title-verso page. The British Library didn't indicate any additional editions. Basically, Google's response this time was "We're not sure if it's in copyright so you're not going to see anything more than snippets."