10 years for Google Books and Europeana: copyright law lessons that the EU could learn from the USA

Abstract

Mass digitization projects that have been carried out by libraries and their commercial partners across the Atlantic, such as Google Books and Europeana, are celebrating their 10th birthdays. This article analyses what legal challenges they pose to the copyright law systems, and how the US and EU jurisdictions have responded to them. In particular, the article identifies certain elements in the US copyright law system that played an important role in encouraging the creation of innovative and value-added services in the library sector. These elements include the transformative use doctrine, the restrictive interpretation of the market harm criterion and the openness towards commercial reuse of works. It is then discussed whether, and how, these elements could be better integrated in the EU copyright law system in order to foster the European library and information technology sector.

Traditional Ecological Knowledge from the internet? The case of hay meadows in Europe

“…5 By 2012 the Google Books project had scanned 30 million out of copyright books, most of which are in a searchable text format (Matulionyte, 2016). 6 Note that we have found some of these sources to contain non-searchable pdfs that can be accessed in searchable form directly from Google.…”