Caught Up In Copyright Law

The recording industry has gained a new partner in its myopic campaign of strict copyright law enforcement: the publishing industry. What publishers oppose, however, is far more significant than the freedom to shuffle between Bruce Hornsby and U2 on an iPod. When a group of publishers announced last week that they disapproved of a Harvard University Libraries (HUL) project to digitize a portion of Harvard’s books, they declared their hostility toward the enrichment and advancement of the academic world.

In December, HUL and Google began a joint venture to digitize some 40,000 volumes held in Harvard’s collections. Following successful completion of the pilot program, all 15 million volumes held in Harvard’s libraries could eventually be digitized. The news was greeted with excitement and support throughout the academic community. Digitization, after all, offers a means of dissolving the physical barriers of library walls and book covers; with digitization, a field researcher in Mongolia could have the entire Widener Library collection at his fingertips. The concept represents the ultimate realization of the Internet’s potential and promise. But book publishers don’t see it that way.

“The law does not permit wholesale copying (which is what digitization is),” a publishing representative wrote to The Crimson last week. Yet the digitization project only seeks to make excerpts of copyrighted material publicly available, a service that Amazon has provided for years. Even if the project did technically violate existing copyright law, this legal complication would derive from the obsolescence of copyright law, not the law’s actual intent. After all, the bulk of copyright law was written before digitization or the Internet ever existed. In fact, the true spirit of the copyright statutes has always been to benefit, not detriment, of the academic community. Copyright law is aimed against plagiarizers and pirates, not responsible institutions providing a service for the public good. By opposing digitization, however, publishers are only engaging in an exercise in the manipulation of outdated statutes rather than the enforcement of critical regulation.

No one would argue that authors and publishers should not receive royalties or that HUL and Google should be allowed to proceed in their project without restrictions. Nevertheless, book publishers now have a golden opportunity to learn a lesson that the recording industry required almost a decade to absorb: royalties and a digital platform are not mutually exclusive. The success of the iTunes music store verifies this principle. The recording industry could have deployed a legal and effective solution like iTunes immediately after online music began to gain popularity; instead, they sued scores of consumers and resisted the inevitability of the fall of the CD and the rise of the MP3. The result is a nation of bitter consumers, depressed music sales, and rampant illegal file sharing. There is an iTunes service that, while successful, would have been immeasurably more successful had it been activated years earlier—before the spread of illicit services like Kazaa and Limewire. As it turned out, the recording industry was damaged by its own draconian devices.

Now, technology has laid the same two paths in front of the publishing industry. Publishers can cooperate with promising and worthy ventures such as that of Harvard and Google, responsibly protecting their own interests while embracing the power of the new digital age. Alternatively, they can continue to needlessly obstruct scholarly progress, frustrating the academic world and thrusting it into developmental inertia.

The choice is clear, and the way to begin is evident: publishers ought to work with, not inhibit, Harvard and Google in their digitization venture. Progress shouldn’t be limited by rusty laws or the short-sighted opportunists that exploit them.

Andrew M. Trombly ’08, a Crimson editorial comper, lives in Canaday Hall.