GoogleBooksOpenQuestion

DRAFT

The digital heritage (e.g. public domain books or works) is imported in Google books due to a Google agreement with various university and public libraries in the US. The idea looks very nice (at least on the paper) in order to provide a large access to public domain works. But I was very surprise by the move of public domain to a kind of non-free license forbidding the commercial use (cf. blog:2006-09-06 Google Books Killing Public Domain). Digging more into the Google books web service, I have a lot of question regarding the service and would like to find answer in order to better understand the service and its implication.

• Google is adding two pages with a kind of license for public domain works ? Does it mean that Google re-licensed the work under its new non-free license or the user is still able to use,(re)distribute,modify the scanned work without any restriction ? Could we remove the first pages of the PDF document ?
• Works are OCRed (search inside the work is working) but the PDF version is only including the bitmap scanned pages. Is there a way to download the OCRed full text ? or to download a specific PDF version with both (text and bitmap) ?
• Does Google own the copyright of the scanned document ? as the copyright is covering an original work ? Where is the originality from a scanned document ?