On 9/26/06, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
To what extent is this true under US law?
The claim to ownership of a scan from 1665 is odious. Perhaps it's just me.
- d.
On 26/09/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "Hurst, Phil" Phil.Hurst@royalsoc.ac.uk To: jwales@wikia.com Date: Tue, 26 Sep 2006 11:34:56 +0100 Subject: Royal Society Digital Journal Archive
Dear Jimmy
It has come to our attention that there is some confusion regarding the copyright status of the Royal Society's digital journal archive.
The entire digital archive is covered by copyright. This mean that systematic downloading and hosting by third parties is prohibited.
Thank you for your attention.
Regards
Phil Hurst Publisher
I've not followed the Wikimedia-UK discussion, but bear in mind that the archives, which were just completed and released, are only freely available to the community until November 2006. After that, they will be included with the Royal Society's journal packages, which are not cheap (though more reasonable than many equivalent publishers): http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/index.cfm?page=1365
So I can understand the publisher being upset if there is systematic downloading occuring; they've put a great deal of time, energy and money into producing this archive which they hope to market to libraries and thus keep their publishing business alive. This is less feasible if all these issues are on Wikipedia. IANAL, but I expect if someone *else* (you or me) wanted to go and do the work of scanning and indexing themselves, the Society would have a more difficult time claiming copyright, as the text itself is probably in the public domain. The intellectual property comes with the work of arrangement, cataloging and transferring to a new medium. As far as I know, this is the case (or claimed case, anyway) with many digital archives of old material in the U.S.
-- Phoebe