Hi Om,

Thanks for your concern. Yes, the problem of copyright with different Indian digital libraries collection is quite well known. The most famous example is the Digital Library of India, which was closed down due to copyright infringement.

The difference between NDLI and other Indian digital libraries is that NDLI primarily acts as a portal and link for different digital libraries. Sometimes, materials which are not otherwise accessible because of different restrictions in different digital libraries can be accessed when we login through NDLI. This is because specific contracts are signed between NDLI and those digital libraries. 

So, unlike other digital libraries, they do not host the copyrighted material on their website. They just link to other websites, from where you can get the content.

Regards,
Bodhisattwa

On Sun, 15 Mar 2020, 06:35 omshivaprakash@gmail.com, <omshivaprakash@gmail.com> wrote:
We have had great problem with earlier digital library projects which government undertook. 36 scan centers/hubs millions of books without copyright verification (note: many won’t go through proper copyright process in India) and the entire project was shutdown making the works inaccessible to public. Virtual library 
http://www.nvli.in/ has been down after burning millions in meetings. 
http://bharatavani.in/ Which was supposed to be the multilingual digital library for 100+ Indian language only hosts copyrighted content and multilevel locked in process to download and use content - even for public/research purposes. It’s very much needed to see if they really mark the content under cc-by-sa. Hope they really understand this. 

On Sun, Mar 15, 2020 at 2:43 AM Asaf Bartov <abartov@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Yes.  I referred to "their content" in Bodhisattwa's statement.  PD metadata is not "their content", really.

   A.

Asaf Bartov (he/him/his)

Senior Program Officer, Emerging Wikimedia Communities

Wikimedia Foundation


Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us make it a reality!


On Sat, Mar 14, 2020 at 9:50 PM Ankry <ankry.wiki@onet.pl> wrote:

I don't think there is a problem here.

From the copyright point of view, the content we want to copy from them is PD (expired copyright).

The problem was their ToU that did not allow commercial republishing.

If we republished without permission, then they would accuse us a violation of ToU and eg. suspend users' accounts. I doubt they would be able to sue a republisher for anything as they are not the copyright holder.

Once we get their permission to publish in Wikimedia, we can publish there under the correct copyright status (PD) and anybody can download therefrom for any purpose. Reusers are not bound by their ToU. The permission is to be not bound by their ToU limits, and is unrelated to copyright.

Ankry


On 14.03.2020 20:12, Asaf Bartov wrote:


On Sat, Mar 14, 2020, 20:03 Bodhisattwa Mandal <bodhisattwa.rgkmc@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Ankry,

As part of the understanding, NDLI is giving permission to use their contents to be used on Wikimedia sites as needed.

This is of course not enough. Permission must be given to the entire world, not to Wikimedia sites only.  I know you know this, but it is important NDLI understand this, too.

   A.

Also, anything not compatible with Wikimedia sites and licensing will not be uploaded in any way.

Regards,
Bodhisattwa


On Sat, 14 Mar 2020 at 19:55, Ankry <ankry.wiki@onet.pl> wrote:

I'm just looking at them.

They have restriction for non-commercial use of their content in their ToU.
So uploading anything to Commons without their explicit permission may be against their ToU (even if consistent with copyright law).
Do we care?

Ankry


On 14.03.2020 11:18, Nicolas VIGNERON wrote:
Hi,

That's a really great news! Thanks for sharing it.
I browse quickly the content they have and wow, this is really multilingual. I even found some bilingual books with Breton (mislabelled as French) and I saw a lot of other minority languages!

Do you already know what the next steps will be? Do you need help?

Cheers, ~nicolas

Le sam. 14 mars 2020 à 09:52, Bodhisattwa Mandal <bodhisattwa.rgkmc@gmail.com> a écrit :
Hi all,

It gives us immense pleasure to announce to the Wikimedia community that National Digital Library of India (NDLI), Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) and Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) have signed a tripartite non-binding Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for a 2-years partnership. National Digital Library of India is a Ministry of Human Resource Development project, developed at IIT Kharagpur which aims to build a virtual repository of learning resources and literature metadata.

Through this understanding, we will work together on:
  • integrating Wikisource and Wikidata contents on NDLI website.
  • building up technical infrastructure on NDLI website to crowdsource
    metadata curation on Wikidata and proofreading on Wikisource websites.
  • importing relevant contents and data from NDLI website to Wikidata and Wikisource.
  • identifying and pursuing collaboration opportunities around other Wikimedia projects, such as Wikibooks.
After months of discussion among the three parties, the understanding was finalized during International Symposium on Knowledge Engineering for Digital Library Design 2019, an international conference organized collaboratively by NDLI and UNESCO at IIT Delhi, where WMF was a technical partner.

Many apologies for cross-posting the announcement in different relevant mailing lists.

Regards,
Jayanta and Bodhisattwa
CIS-A2K
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