CIPPM Director Maurizio Borghi has been selected to receive a Google Faculty Research Award that will support his research project on enhancing access to digitized books.

Google Faculty Research Awards are highly competitive prizes made by the US company to support world-class faculty performing cutting-edge research in computer science, engineering, and related fields. The grant will enable MaurizioBorghi to appoint a PhD researcher to work on legal and policy aspects of his project.

Maurizio Borghi has argued in his book Copyright and Mass Digitization (Oxford University Press, 2013 – co-authored with Stavroula Karapapa) that private companies engaged in digitization of cultural heritage, like Google, have a duty to make the digitized content not only accessible to the public, but also available for use and re-use to the benefit of society at large. His work aims at developing efficient mechanisms for clearing copyright on cultural items, based on crowd-sourcing and public participation. Google Books, with its unprecedented reach of texts in every language, is the ideal platform to experiment innovative solutions for right clearance.