University of Michigan’s initiative to digitize hundreds orphaned books of the university under the label ‘Orphan Works Project’ has been scrapped owing to a law suit slapped on it by a guild of Authors. As a part of this project the UM intended to identify and digitize hundreds of orphan works (books that are subject to copyright but whose copyright holders cannot be identified or contacted) and had plans of releasing 27 digitized books by 13th October and an additional 140 books starting in November. This project was a part of the University’s Hathi Trust Project, an initiative to digitize the university’s complete library collection.
Canadian and Australian guild had filed the law suit on 12th September, against a consortium of university libraries over the digital library initiative known as Hathi Trust. The guild claims that many books digitalized by the university consortium claiming to be orphan has living authors or their relatives that still claim copyright rights but do not know about the digitization project. Authors Guild President Scott Turow reportedly issued a statement saying Michigan's digitizing project needlessly puts works under copyright at risk.
“Even if it weren’t for this preposterous, ad-hoc initiative, we’d have a major problem with the digital repository. Authors shouldn’t have to trust their works to a group that’s making up the rules as it goes along,” Turrow was reported saying.
In response to the law suit, the UM Library halted the impugned project and stated on September 16 that “Our pilot process is flawed…. Having learned from our mistakes—we are, after all, an educational institution—we have already begun an examination of our procedures to identify the gaps that allowed volumes that are evidently not orphan works to be added to the list.”
According to the Dean of the University of Michigan Orphans Work Project is intended to increase the readership of works that are out of print, not to damage their integrity.
Images: Hathi trust, UM Orphan Works project
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Author: Adithi Varna
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