Are bibliographies copyrighted?
Interesting. So the answer is basically, it depends. It seems bibliographies (and footnotes) are important metadata for the 100+ million books out there, plus countless journal articles and other publications. As chez pointed out in the blue thread on this topic, bibs and footnotes are the original hyperlinks. As such, when these works are transfered to the internet, the most important thing will be to capture the metadata so they can be properly indexed according to popularity (same way Google indexs web pages, by popularity). So it seems IMO that Google needs the full text searches, but more importantly, it needs the bibliography information so that searches have some relevance (otherwise, searching 7 million books on “Dante” is a waste of time without any relevance). To that end, I would say Googles intention here is highly self-interested and the notion of putting full-text works online is a secondary at best goal, Google is building a proprietary backend database of metadata compo
Grouse’s comment is correct – the press release says “bibliographic information” not “bibliography”, which would mean things like title, author, date and place of publication, publisher, pages, edition, maybe things like Library of Congress Subject Headings or an abstract or other metadata. Not a bibliography of sources cited. Such information, of course, would not be covered by copyright (abstracts aren’t covered by copyright law, which is why you can get people producing databases like PubMed that contain bibliographic information). And thanks to monju for an interesting insight into whether bibliographies are covered by copyright.
