Ray Saintonge wrote:
Alphax (Wikipedia email) wrote:
Roger Luethi wrote:
It is not so much about copyright reform as it is about investing money
rather than spending it, and this is a rare opportunity to talk about that.
Another example, unrelated to copyright reform: Wikipedia editors need access to primary sources, particularly academic journals. The fate of current ventures in Open Access journals largely determines whether most potential Wikipedia editors will have easy access to the sources they need in the years to come, and funding for these journals (or lack thereof) will be a major factor.
Right. There are journal archives around with stuff going back hundreds of years, but they claim copyright on all their materials; if we could free that which already qualifies for PD-old, it would be a major step in the right direction.
Being copyright is not just a simple matter of claiming copyright. The old stuff is already free; it doesn't need any more freeing. The law decides, not the claimants. If it qualifies just use it.
I can't legally do so without violating the TOS of the archives; they scanned and (apparantly) OCRed the originals, and claim copyright over all their materials. I respect the copyright on the OCRing, but not on the scanning (Bridgeman vs. Corel). Unfortunately I'm not in the United States, so I can't use that as my excuse.