2006/9/26, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com:
On 26/09/06, James Hardy wikimediauk@weeb.biz wrote:
Uploading the original PDFs to a publicly accessable website would most likely be a copyright violation, so we wouldn't want to do that anyway.
In the UK, not in the US.
Another question is what to do about about diagrams (assuming that there are some), I would imagine that if the the RS claims copyright of the scans we can't just extract them and use them. Simple ones I imagine we can (and probably should) convert to SVG, but for more detailed ones, that could be tricky.
So no-one in the UK should do this, but someone in the US may say "you claim you own a scan of a diagram from 1720 and no-one else can touch it? O rly. Sue and be damned." This is something we would need to be *quite* clear that we were or were not going to say ahead of time, of course.
(Though put like that, it looks very like the National Portrait Gallery issue. Have they ceased the vague attempts at legal intimidation after Jimbo indicated Wikimedia's attitude would in fact be "sue and be damned"?)
cc: to foundation-l on this issue.
According to my experience as a scientist writing sometimes a review articles you have to '''always''' ask for permission to use graphs which are copyrighted or included in a copyrighted publications or databases. However, the source scientific data which was used for preparing graph is not a subject of the copyright law, so you can simply draw a new graph using the data from the original one and put the citations of a source.