On 12/7/06, Rob Church robchur@gmail.com wrote:
On 07/12/06, Delphine Ménard notafishz@gmail.com wrote: Hmm...
"The Crown copyright protected material (other than the Royal Arms and departmental or agency logos) may be reproduced free of charge in any format or medium provided it is reproduced accurately and not used in a misleading context."
That sounds about right...
"The exception to this rule is for material downloaded from our DocumentsOnline service (see below)."
Fair enough...
"Where any of the Crown copyright items on this site are being republished or copied to others, the source of the material must be identified and the copyright status acknowledged."
Again, fair enough, and standard procedure for us anyway.
"Images on this site may not be reproduced without payment of a fee to the image library."
That doesn't sound quite right to me; in fact, it contradicts the earlier Crown Copyright statement.
Crown Copyright is not a free lisence so we can't use Crown Copyright material in any case
It might be worth firing off an email or making other enquiries to check, unless someone else here knows what's going on with these.
I assume the uploader is relying on the fact that the copyright on the Magna Carta itself has long since expired (in fact it was never protected by copyright). However since this is far from being a slavish copy and elements of it are creative (placement of the string and seal at the bottem being the obvious ones) I think the UK National Archives can legitimately claim copyright even under US law and those the image should be deleted as a copyvio.