I do not agree with the praise of Google Print e.g. in the weblog entries of Peter Suber’s “Open Access News”. Google is – unlike Yahoo’s http://www.opencontentalliance.org – definitively no advocate of the Public Domain. Google is blocking users outside of the US from viewing books which are Public Domain world wide (resp. in the US, the European Union, Canada, Australia etc.). From the items of the Google Library program one can see outside the US only items published before ca. 1865 freely.
A small list of such free works and more information can be found at:
http://wiki.netbib.de/coma/GooglePrint
According to the NYT “[e]ventually, the European sites will give users access to data about foreign-language books in the collections of the New York Public Library and the university libraries of Stanford, Harvard, Michigan and Oxford.”
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2005_10_16_fosblogarchive.html#a112964690233093989
Google should give free access to all books published before 1923 (PD in the US) AND of which the author is 70 years dead (European copyright term).
Google is claiming copyright for simple facsimile reprints of PD works made e.g. by the publisher Kessinger. This is clearly COPYFRAUD in the US!
http://ssrn.com/abstract=787244
The cooperating libraries (including Oxford outside the US) should not support a project which is only serving US interests not serving the enrichment of world wide knowledge and Public Domain.
I would like to read from Open Access advocates like Suber clear words against Google’s discriminating practice.