On 9/27/06, phoebe ayers <phoebe.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I've not followed the Wikimedia-UK discussion,
If you had you would have run across this link:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/36_FSupp2d_191.htm
Which will give you some idea what people are talking about.
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):
We have enough uni students that we could likely still get our hands
on them if we needed to.
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.
University libraries are already pretty much forced to buy their
product. I suspect this is aimed at a different audience.
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.
"Hi we are wikipedians we would like to scan all your old texts. No we
have no experience of scanning or preservation. Odd they hung up." In
any case I adressed the isses of textual content through suggesting
OCR scans. Although that leaves pictures such as what appears to be a
case of cyclopia in a colt in one of the early journals.
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.
see the link at the top and this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp.
--
geni