At 01:55 +0100 23/9/06, geni wrote: Below are two extracts from an article from the THES (Times Higher Education Supplement) Friday 22nd September 2006. *** Ambiguous copyright law catches out scholars Publishers and galleries are charging unnecessarily. Jessica Shepherd reports Academics are being incorrectly told to hand over thousands of pounds to use works of art, literature and music in their research, a report has revealed. The study by the British Academy criticises those copyright holders who wrongly charge scholars in the name of the law. Many publishers and art galleries have failed to grasp that copyright law does not apply when material is to be used for private study, criticism, review or non-commercial research, the report points out. It argues that the demands of copyright owners hinder scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. The British Academy hopes to lobby the Government to make copyright law clearer for publishers and academics with the publication of its study Copyright and Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. [...] Stephen Navin, chief executive of the Music Publishers' Association, said: "Our members are not trying to mislead academics. Copyright law is complicated...." [...] Hmmm.... "non commercial research". Wikipedia is non commercial, but derivatives, such as Answers.com are not, thanks to the GFDL. Gordo -- "Think Feynman"///////// http://pobox.com/~gordo/ gordon.joly(a)pobox.com///

On 9/23/06, Scott Keir <scottkeir(a)yahoo.co.uk> wrote: Under UK law that could probably be described as a legal grey area. Scans of public domain work may or may not be subject to copyright within the UK. Case law says probably. The limited amount of legal opinion I know about says probably not. It is hard to tell. -- geni

On 9/23/06, Rich <rich.rr(a)gmail.com> wrote: That appears to be aimed at single use. If I remeber I'll phone them up on monday -- geni

Great, I don't mind helping, when I know where and what. An obvious suggestion but do we want to have a wiki to 1) Coordinating download/scans/error checking 2)Upload the pdf's to and 3) store the OCR's and as a base for error checking? On 25/09/06, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> 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. However the originals need to be available somehow (pehaps in a restricted sense) for people to verify the OCR against when marking up (I'm assuming that this is to be going on to wikisource), as an error in a formula would be very hard to spot for a layman 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. James On 25/09/06, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote:

If they have an intention to put stuff online for free-as-in-beer for two months, and then charge people for it later, then I think it is certainly imperative that someone get a private personal archive of absolutely every bit of it, sooner rather than later, and then we can explore the legal status at our leisure. geni wrote: