Quality | 2009.09.11
Give our lost books life | Tom Watson
Brussels risks creating a knowledge gap if it does not follow the US and update its copyright laws
If the government announced that it was going to prohibit you from buying nine out of 10 of the world\'s books, you\'d probably react with anger. Yet because of our outdated copyright laws, this is the situation British readers face today. For more than a year, I\'ve been attempting to obtain a copy of The Winds of Change: Macmillan to Heath, 1957-75. The author, John Ramsden , is one of the most distinguished historians in Britain. Yet just over a decade after publication, his book is now impossible to purchase.
The European commission is holding a hearing next week to examine the impact of an agreement between American authors, publishers and Google to resuscitate millions of out-of-print, in-copyright books such as The Winds of Change. If all goes ahead as expected, American readers will be able to purchase digital copies of these titles.
European readers will have less luck. Our continent\'s hodgepodge of backward-looking copyright rules designed to protect content creators are preventing an American-style breakthrough to bring the world\'s lost books back to life.
History teaches us how dangerous it is to lock away learning. In the middle ages, scholars created the Baghdad-based "House of Wisdom", or Bait al-Hikma . This library represented a key achievement of the Islamic golden age. It translated books from Persian, Indian and Greek into Arabic, spreading wisdom to a wide audience and fuelling advances in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, chemistry, zoology and geography. "Whoever wanted was at liberty to copy any book he wished to copy, or whoever required to read a certain book could do so," writes JW Thompson in The Medieval Library (another classic that is almost impossible to buy).
By contrast, European data was stored away in monasteries. As Edward Gibbon writes in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: "The age of Arabian learning continued about 500 years and was coeval with the darkest and most slothful period of European annals." Only after the arrival of the printing press did the Renaissance and Enlightenment accelerate the dissemination of knowledge through Europe, allowing it to surge ahead of the rest of the world.
Fast-forward a little more than a millennium and we find ourselves living through a similarly exhilarating era of knowledge. In my first job, in the Labour party library, I toiled away in the dusty stacks searching for information. By the time I became a minister, the same research could be conducted with a few keystrokes. This explosion and levelling of access to information represents one of the great wonders of our time.
Authors and copyright holders need to be remunerated for their work. Instead of seeing the net as a threat, however, the big rights-holders should grasp a giant opportunity. Forward-thinking publishers from the Oxford University Press to Bertelsmann support the American books agreement, which sets up a new non-profit registry. For the first time people will be able to search, preview and buy online access to a great number of out-of-print books.
We cannot allow Europe to be left behind. EU commissioner Viviane Reding recently called for the creation of a Europe-wide public registry [of out-of-print books] that "could stimulate private investment in digitisation, while ensuring that authors get fair remuneration". She concluded: "Let us be very clear: if we do not reform our European copyright rules on orphan works and libraries swiftly, digitisation and the development of attractive content offers will not take place in Europe, but on the other side of the Atlantic."
How right she is. And by the way, does anybody have a copy of Ramsden\'s The Winds of Change: Macmillan to Heath, 1957-75?
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/03/books-copyright-google
