'Yes We Scan': Michael Geist Defends Concordia's Poetry Scans
In his article, "Yes We Scan: Why Concordia Should Not Shelve Its Book Scanner," Michael Geist, an expert in technology law, argues that Concordia University's poetry center should not be forced to stop scanning poetry books for distribution on the internet. We reported on an initial response to the poetry center's debacle, in which Globe and Mail writer Kate Taylor suggested that the center shelve its book scanner. In response, Geist writes "Digitization initiatives often raise legal fears, but the experience in other countries demonstrate that the legal challenges are frequently overstated." More:
For example, U.S. courts have ruled that massive digitization programs such as those undertaken by Google qualify as fair use. The Google Book Search initiative rightly distinguishes between the act of digitization or scanning (a data mining and non-consumptive use of the work that qualifies as fair use) and the making available of those works to the public. This means that millions of books can be freely digitized without fear of copyright infringement, though full access to the text is limited to public domain works (where the copyright has expired) and licensed materials where the copyright owner has granted permission. Partial access (often referred to as snippets) may be granted consistent with fair use.
Canadian law features fair dealing rather than fair use, but a similar approach could be adopted. It goes without saying that all public domain works – which could reasonably be estimated to include anything published before 1940 – could be digitized and made immediately accessible in full text. This appears to be part of what Concordia had in mind with respect to its poetry digitization plans. In addition to the materials that are almost certainly in the public domain, educational institutions, archivists, and the government could launch a crowdsourcing initiative where Canadians help identify additional public domain works of authors who died more than 50 years ago. This would include many books published in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. Those works could also be digitized and made accessible in full text without the need for permission or further licensing payments. Such efforts should be welcomed by supporters of Canadian culture as a way to breath new life into long-forgotten Canadian works and as a means of raising new awareness of Canadian history.
The situation for in-copyright works is more complicated and requires separate legal analysis for digitization of the works and the manner in which they are made available. The first part – digitizing or scanning the works by educational or research institutions – likely qualifies as fair dealing as it meets the research purpose (and therefore the 2012 reforms to fair dealing have little impact on the issue) and the six-factor fair dealing analysis would likely treat the act of digitizing for full text search purposes as more fair. It may involve a large amount of copying, but the other factors – including alternatives and effect on the work – would tend toward fairness. Enabling full-text searching for Canadian books would increase their “discoverability” without negatively affecting their commercial value. Indeed, it would likely increase their value.