On 9/28/06, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Is this a new part of copyright law that I haven't heard of, where not only sweat-of-the-brow but also tear-in-the-eye is sufficient to prohibit copying of century old texts?
Well UK law does have the moral rights bit but that is unlikely to appy in this case.
*Claiming* copyright (where none is due) is never difficult. Scammers, publishers and libraries do it all the time. Truthful people call this copy*fraud*, because it just isn't *right*.
In this case there is an argument to be made that under english and welsh law the scans are covered by copyright so the message at the start of this thread is reasonable.
Not at all! With cataloging come database rights[1] that expire after 15 years. But this is not copyright. And the transfer to a new medium is not an intellectual effort.
Under UK law you can probably also pick up 20 years for rearrangement of text you do any of that (under typographical arrangements).