I was sad to pack up the clay archivists and say goodbye to their smiling faces. I’m sure they are happy to be back with the rest of their friends in the Great Room on Funston Avenue, but oh, the stories they have to tell of their travels to a gallery in Los Angeles.
Carolyn Peter is the director and curator of the Laband Art Gallery at Loyola Marymount University. She curated From Clay to the Cloud: The Internet Archive and Our Digital Legacy, which was on view from January 23-March 20, 2016 at the Laband.
Google’s massive book scanning project is finally over, and it’s a huge win for libraries and fair use. On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by the Author’s Guild, which had whatsapp lead argued that Google’s scanning of millions of books was an infringement of copyright on a grand scale. The Supreme Court’s decision means that the Second Circuit case holding that Google’s creation of a database including millions of digital books is fair use still stands. The appeals court explained how its fair use rationale aligns with the very purpose of copyright law: “[W]hile authors are undoubtedly important intended beneficiaries of copyright, the ultimate, primary intended beneficiary is the public, whose access to knowledge copyright seeks to advance by providing rewards for authorship.”
Google Books gives readers and internet users the world over access to millions of works that had previously been hidden away in the archives of our most elite universities. As a Google representative said in a statement, “The product acts like a card catalog for the digital age by giving people a new way to find and buy books while at the same time advancing the interests of authors.”