[Commons-Law] Google to scan manuscripts and books from University of Mysore

[Ravishekhar S]

> Does anyone have any clue as to what he could mean?  This doesn't even seem > like a (normal enough) mistake of "patent" for "copyright", because he's talking > of making them "available on the public domain".  Any comments?

Probably, he's been misquoted or it is a slip of tongue because Prof.
Prasad, addressing our college on our annual day referred to this
tieup with Google and said Google is talking to the University about
putting its works that are in public domain, online.

Also, he was pretty receptive, when the University was petitioned (
http://mygrapa.googlepages.com/pet-en-nvol.pdf ) to allow digitising(a
la Project Gutenberg not Google's Library Program) to salvage many
titles including both public domain and copyrighted (some are
unfortunately out of print) titles and sought them to permit
volunteers to transcribe and put them online and license in a licence
like Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 India (
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/in/ ) which would
enable us to share the books online while keeping the right to sale,
exclusively with University of Mysore.

University of Mysore, thanks to its royal patrons and great
institutions of knowledge, has some rarest books in its collection.
Kautilya's Arthashashtra was discovered in Oriental Research
Library(now Oriental Research Insitute) by R. Shamasastri. Google has
got the technology (also GPLed the OCR software that it improvised)
and Google India is supposedly investing on OCRs for Indian languages,
which I hope will be GPLed as well.

Regards,

Ravi Shekhar S