"While these public private partnerships enable the digitization of these works they also contain 10-year exclusive agreements allowing the private companies carrying out the digitization to commercialize the digitized documents. During this period only a limited number of these works may be offered online by the BnF."

As none of the agreement partners bothered to reply to inquiries from journalists and free culture advocates, the only source of information was a press release from the Ministry of Culture mentioning an official agreement between the Library (Bibliothèque nationale de France, BnF) and ProQuest. The release was highlighting the somewhat obscure branch "BnF-Partenariats" as executives of the contract, and that this agreement is part of a wider initiative: "Early European Books."

The issue here is not commercial use of materials in the public domain but the labyrinthine logic of the agreement. This logic proposes that a client from the public sector (i.e. research and education institutions) will buy a number of works handled by another public institution (i.e. the French National Library), and the profits will reimburse money advanced by a private service provider. A painful situation for our cultural heritage, forcibly entrusted to be the square peg to get into the round monetary hole.

What is unclear, however, are the legal terms under which the digital copies will be handled. In plain English, the BnF has signed an agreement to sell access to digitized copies of books in the public domain. This makes a travesty of its official role: the BnF is supposed to grant access to these works, but the BnF-ProQuest agreement actually blocks access. In the present (whacko) case, the Library – that is, the public institution invested with the power to manage commons, – not only does what is normally the publisher's job, selling, but it also monetizes these works, thus acting as a merchant, which takes work from publishers. The larger questions this raises over exclusivity and ownership of these digital versions are very important. From what's been said to date, it seemingly implies that the digitization of those books means the outcome is a brand new production owned by the ProQuest, the digitization service provider.

Even more strange? ProQuest's agreements elsewhere are quite different, and not nearly as controversial. The BnF-ProQuest agreement is a part of the "Early European Books" initiative. In addition to the French, four other national libraries are a part of the effort: the Royal Library (Denmark), the National Central Library of Florence (Italy), the National Library of the Netherlands, and the The Wellcome Library, London (UK).

The details for each of these agreements, however, are quite different than the agreement in France. Indeed, in every other case, ProQuest digitizes, at its own expense, the works in the public domain operated by the respective partnering national library. It then offers free access to the digital versions of these materials within the country. As ProQuest needs to earn money, it sells the access to its database to other countries (through subscriptions contracted by the universities). According to the BnF-ProQuest agreement, however, no free access to the digital versions is provided other than the very limited version as described above.

Oh, and as if a national library agreeing to sell the country's cultural heritage was not absurd enough, when asked for the details of the agreement the BnF has now admitted that its contract with ProQuest has been misplaced. One might properly note that, so too, has the public domain been "misplaced" with this deal.

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For example, copyright terms can be extended retrospectively, which means that material will be locked up for longer than originally promised in the "deal". Or there can be a privatization of public domain materials, using contracts, as reported here by Communia:

Last week the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) concluded two new agreements with private companies to digitize over 70.000 old books, 200.000 sound recordings and other documents belonging (either partially or as a whole) to the public domain. While these public private partnerships enable the digitization of these works they also contain 10-year exclusive agreements allowing the private companies carrying out the digitization to commercialize the digitized documents. During this period only a limited number of these works may be offered online by the BnF.

It's a sad sign of the extent to which once-great libraries and galleries have been assimilated by the copyright industry and its culture of owning rather than sharing that they can't see why their complicity in this kind of enclosure of the knowledge commons is a deep betrayal of their origins and primary mission.

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1. Diminished copyright exceptions via contract: Thanks to the digital era, the entertainment industry likes to claim that you no longer purchase content, you merely "license" it. Thus, they're able to establish their own rules to govern what you do with the content, rather than relying on the boundaries of copyright law. As such, for the most part, many have tried to (a) claim copyright/control over more than they have a right to (b) deny you any fair use exceptions and (c) deny you your first sale rights to resell the products you "bought." In other words, by claiming that the sale is a "license" rather than a "sale," companies are effectively able to wipe out the important limitations on copyright.
2. Regulatory capture: The article highlights how copyright policy these days appears to be almost entirely driven by the entertainment industry, who is merely one beneficiary of the law -- but not the intended beneficiary (that would be the public). He uses the examples of the recent "voluntary" (at the strong urging of the White House) agreement between ISPs and the entertainment industry, as well as SOPA, which he notes just takes those "private" powers to extend copyright law even further:

   The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), the companion bill to the Senate’s PROTECT IP Act, would further privatize adjudication and punishment. Title I of that law (dubbed the E-PARASITE Act) creates a “market-based system to protect U.S. customers and prevent U.S. funding of sites dedicated to theft of U.S. property.” It achieves this by empowering copyright owners who have a “good faith belief” that they are being “harmed by the activities” of a website to send a notice to the site’s payment providers (e.g. PayPal) and Internet advertisers to end business with the allegedly offending site.
   
   The payment providers and advertisers that receive the notice must stop transactions with the site. No judicial review is required for the notice to be sent and for the payments and advertising curtailed—only the good faith representation of the copyright owner. Damages are also not available to the site owner unless a claimant “knowingly materially” misrepresented that the law covers the targeted site, a difficult legal test to meet. The owner of the site can issue a counter-notice to restore payment processing and advertising but services need not comply with the counter-notice.
   
   There is also a catch: a site owner who issues a counter-notice automatically consents to being sued in U.S. courts (a strong disincentive for sites based abroad). With few checks at all, SOPA gives copyright owners a sharp tool to disrupt and shut down websites. Based on their past conduct, there is no reason to think that copyright owners will use this tool with any measure of restraint.