[Foundation-l] Good example; The works of Charles Darwin freed :)

[Andrew Gray]

On 19/10/06, Birgitte SB <birgitte_sb at yahoo.com> wrote:
> The article does mention other language editons
> (Danish, Russian).  So I just want to point out that
> he very well may own the copyright on the
> translations.

Not to mention...

"Darwin Online features many newly transcribed or
never-before-published manuscripts"

Bingo, entirely legitimate "unpublished copyright" for parts of the
corpus. You can copyright Shakespeare (for a while) legally in most
jurisdictions if you happen to find an unpublished manuscript!

> Most all websites do a poor job of
> distingiushing the different copyrights of the variety
> of material they host.  It is quite common for people
> simply write the terms of use to cover the most
> restrictive copyright material on the site.

Indeed. "Please contact us before doing anything" is, on occasion,
"please get in touch with us so we can tell you whether or not X bit
is copyrighted".

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk