If they have an intention to put stuff online for free-as-in-beer
for two months, and then charge people for it later, then I think it is
certainly imperative that someone get a private personal archive of
absolutely every bit of it, sooner rather than later, and then we can
explore the legal status at our leisure.
geni wrote:
On 9/23/06, Scott Keir <scottkeir(a)yahoo.co.uk>
wrote:
On Saturday, September 23, 2006, at 01:45 am,
David Gerard wrote:
http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/index.cfm?page=1373
Everything back to 1665. Really quite a lot of which is public domain.
Get downloading.
Is it really public domain? Or is there copyright in the scans? I
ask
as the website says:
"The archive will be freely available online until December 2006 and,
following this period, will be available as part of Royal Society
journal subscription packages or alternatively on a-pay per-view basis."
So presumably, they haven't put online for two months free access the
results of goodness-knows-how-much hours of scanning just for people to
spider mirror it...?
Scott
Under UK law that could probably be described as a legal grey area.
Scans of public domain work may or may not be subject to copyright
within the UK. Case law says probably. The limited amount of legal
opinion I know about says probably not. It is hard to tell.