Should Digital Public Works Be Exclusive?

According to The New York Times, the European Commission look likely to respond to the pressure to limit the amount of time private companies can exercise exclusive use of digitized materials from the public domain.

Having already digitised millions of works, Google remains the biggest benefactor of the current situation. Google and others can restrict access to the works and yet also benefit themselves through the works remaining commercial exclusive to them. The move to reduce the exclusive period from the current 15 years to 7 would enable the public to benefit better from what is ‘public domain’ works. The advocates of the current move wish to see increased access for not-for-profit organizations such as Europeana, which is an online digital service supporting European arts and culture funded by the EU.

As more national treasures and public domain works get digitised it makes sense to get these into the public domain and not restrict them to one digital owner. Google and others may have paid huge sums to digitise the works but they came from libraries who had paid for the original books out of public funds. Some would suggest that what is public should remain public and philanthropy in this case should come before profit.

We Are Waiting For Real News

First we had Barnes and Noble bragging about the size of their digital repository, 700,000 titles. Now we have Sony bragging that they are to offer 1 million titles. When you look closer, you soon discover that the vast majority are public domain works that are from the likes of Google's Book store. Public domain is what it says on the can, ‘in the public domain’, free to use and are 90 years or older, so although good many are in archaic language.

So is it news or mere public posturing like children in a playground arguing who is best or biggest?

Google and Sony have decided to be best buddies on more than just public domain titles and partnered on a promotional game, where users must use search Google Books to answer five book-related questions per day and write a brief note about books. The winner will receive a Sony Reader.

More interesting is the strong rumours circulating that Sony has a new ebook reader. We were asked to speculate on this but in today’s climate of a new eink ‘lookie likie’ every few weeks and the wider adoption of Adobe’s ACS4 DRM service by other device manufacturers, we wondered what they could do to excite the market. 1 million public domain books is hardly exciting. Maybe they could go wireless but again what’s so special when others have done it anyway? Now colour eink would be interesting but we know that isn’t going to happen soon. A media tablet to out manoeuvre Apple would be a smart move, but we doubt that this is for release today.

So its back to the playground and the wait for the Kindle in the UK and more importantly the Apple Touch tablet.