Probably, they will claim some kind of copyrights over the digitalisation of the 1911 Encyclopedia.
That's not possible from the point of view of the copyright law as scanning is not a creative expression and the copyright of the original material has expired. The only thing which is possible is to claim copyright on additional markup, layout, presentation and additional graphics.
I think they fully deserve the legal copyright on their markup, layout, presentation and additional graphics :-)
More seriously: even if the quality of the scanned text will be improved, I do hope that nobody will whip together a script to suck the 1911 contents into Wikipedia wholesale. Every article needs to be read, checked for OCR mistakes, accuracy and outdated language, wikified and merged with whatever material we already have on the topic. Many technical articles will be useless because the terminology has changed. In mathematics for instance, it is next to impossible to read a paper that was written in the 19th century.
Axel
Probably, they will claim some kind of copyrights over the digitalisation of the 1911 Encyclopedia.
Well, how could they tell where we got it? We could have typed the stuff in by hand, after all...
More seriously: even if the quality of the scanned text will be improved,
I do hope that nobody will whip together a script to suck the 1911 contents into Wikipedia wholesale.
*If* there's going to be a script, I suggest the following: - Only create entrys that are empty on the wiki; keep the others for manual "prescan" (on existing topics, we might not need the old text at all) - Add some text (in red?) as first and last line of the text, stating where it is from, handle with care etc. - Let the script create a list of these articles as [[links]], then add that list as "wikipedia:1911 conversion" (or something) so we can mark off the entries that were proofread by real living humans.
ALternatively, we could create a read-only "1911" namespace, dump it all there and do the conversion by hand.
Magnus
At 07:39 PM 3/15/02 +0100, you wrote:
Probably, they will claim some kind of copyrights over the digitalisation of the 1911 Encyclopedia.
Well, how could they tell where we got it? We could have typed the stuff in by hand, after all...
More seriously: even if the quality of the scanned text will be improved,
I do hope that nobody will whip together a script to suck the 1911 contents into Wikipedia wholesale.
Indeed. I had to google to update the one on the Pribilof islands--the 1911 version ended with the months during which seal hunting "is" legal, meaning when it was legal in 1911. This has no connection to current US law.
I assume there will be similar changes in many geographical entries.
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