A few months after Robert Darnton, the director of the library at Harvard University, sketched out a vision for a national online library in the U.S., he has found himself on an A-list steering committee at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society set up to host a research and planning initiative for a “Digital Library of America.”
This project is a fascinating one. On the one hand, we have the enthusiasm of people like David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States of America, who is quoted in the Berkman release saying, “It is exciting to contemplate a future where the cultural heritage of our country is available at your fingertips. It is, therefore, important to bring together all interested parties to create a vision of that future.”
But, as Darnton himself concedes in a new essay on this project (the Digital Public Library of America already has an acronym in DPLA):
The greatest obstacle is legal, not financial. Presumably, the DPLA would exclude books currently being marketed, but it would include millions of books that are out of print yet covered by copyright, especially those published between 1923 and 1964, a period when copyright coverage is most obscure, owing to the proliferation of “orphans”—books whose copyright holders have not been located. Congress would have to pass legislation to protect the DPLA from litigation concerning copyrighted, out-of-print books. The rights holders of those books would have to be compensated, yet many of them, especially among academic authors, might be willing to forgo compensation in order to give their books new life and greater diffusion in digitized form. Several authors protested against the commercial character of Google Book Search and expressed their readiness to make their work available free of charge in memoranda filed with the New York District Court.
Indeed, Tony Simpson, the president of the New Zealand Society of Authors sums up what will likely be the biggest beef from content creators in a published exchanged with Darnton:
This is the elephant in the room that is going to bedevil any such proposal anywhere until it is resolved. There is no point in professional writers, i.e., those who seek to earn their living by their writing, putting fingers to keyboard if they are not going to be paid for their efforts. How precisely does Mr. Darnton propose to resolve that conundrum?