Steven Melendez discovered some public domain government documents in Google Books that the service wouldn’t let him download because they had been misclassified as copyrighted; he filled in an online form and less than a week later, a human had reviewed the documents, agreed that they had been misclassified and removed all restrictions.
But, as it turns out, Google provides a form where anyone can ask that a book scanned as part of Google Books be reviewed to determine if it’s in the public domain. And, despite internet companies sometimes earning a mediocre-at-best reputation for responding to user inquiries about free services, I’m happy to report that Google let me know within a week after filling out the form that the book would now be available for reading and download. (Under an agreement with universities, copies of Google’s scans are also stored in the HathiTrust Digital Repository, where public domain material can be universally accessed.)
It’s surprisingly easy to make government records public on Google Books [Steven Melendez/Fast Company]
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