SABREOCRACY.NET (formerly SIVACRACY.NET)

In honor of National Library Week, I write this open letter:

To: Google, William Patry (a copyright expert and Google's senior copyright lawyer), and to Google's Library Partners

Greetings,

I know that you are very excited about the partnership between Google and its Library Partners, who have supplied books and other materials for scanning. I know that some have had serious concerns about the project, but I'm not discussing general concerns here.

All I'm asking for is full access for the public to government documents on Google BookSearch. These documents are in the public domain and therefore should not be limited by claims of copyright, by Google or by the Library Partners.

According to Google's own FAQ:

For books that enter Book Search through the Library Project, what you see depends on the book's copyright status. . . . If the book is in the public domain and therefore out of copyright, you can page through the entire book and even download it and read it offline.

This statement implies all materials on Book Search that one cannot page through or download are not in the public domain.

Can you provide the public a reason why Google BookSearch has not made public domain government documents fully available? These documents include:

* U.S. House and Senate Reports (including these Sunshine Act Reports!)
* Agency and Administrative Materials (including from the Office of the Federal Register, National Archives and Records Administration, Code of Federal Regulation, and the War Department),
* many publications of the U.S. Government Printing Office, and
* U.S. Supreme Court Cases

I'm sure you know that government works created by the U.S. federal government are not protected by copyright; instead these works (with limited exceptions for materials withheld for security, export control, and policy reasons) are in the public domain.

Some of these documents are dually public domain -- not only as government documents, but also because all works published in the United States before 1923 are in the public domain (see this excellent copyright chart) . Why aren't these (1821 House report and 1879 Senate report) fully available?

Already scanned government publications should be available for both full viewing and as downloadable PDFs. (According to Google in regards to public domain material: "Google now allows Internet users all over the world to download (and therefore print and read offline) these same out-of-copyright books.")