[Foundation-l] [Wikimediauk-l] Royal Society archives online until December

[David Gerard]

On 26/09/06, James Hardy <wikimediauk at weeb.biz> 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.


In the UK, not in the US.


> 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.


So no-one in the UK should do this, but someone in the US may say "you
claim you own a scan of a diagram from 1720 and no-one else can touch
it? O rly. Sue and be damned." This is something we would need to be
*quite* clear that we were or were not going to say ahead of time, of
course.

(Though put like that, it looks very like the National Portrait
Gallery issue. Have they ceased the vague attempts at legal
intimidation after Jimbo indicated Wikimedia's attitude would in fact
be "sue and be damned"?)

cc: to foundation-l on this issue.


- d.