Harvard-Google Project Faces Copyright Woes

This Harvard Crimson article presents interesting and opposite viewpoints. For example, Sally Morris, chief executive of the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, is quoted as saying:

The law does not permit wholesale copying (which is what digitisation is) by a commercial organisation of works that are still in copyright. It is also illegal to make those works available digitally once they have been copied.

She also cautions that "Harvard might not be able to discern which books are copyrighted because of varying copyright regulations in different countries."

Jean-Noël Jeanneney, president of the French national library, commented that the project is too American. He believes that it will favor English language and Anglo-Saxon publications, although Harvard has said that non-English publications are a large part of its collection and will be digitized.