On Sun, Dec 15, 2013 at 11:08 AM, Emilio J. RodrÃguez-Posada emijrp@gmail.com wrote:
Quote from full announcement http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2013/12/a-million-fi...
We have released over a million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images to us, allowing us to release them back into the Public Domain.
The language used here confuses me. Given the age of the source material and the lack of originality in a simple page-scan, wouldn't the resulting images already be PD? Perhaps "release them back into the Public Domain," would be better described as "release them to the public" ?
--R