[Foundation-l] [Wikimediauk-l] [Fwd: Royal Society Digital Journal Archive]

[Lars Aronsson]

phoebe ayers wrote:

> So I can understand the publisher being upset if there is 
> systematic downloading occuring; they've put a great deal of 
> time, energy and money into producing this archive which they 
> hope to market to libraries and thus

Is this a new part of copyright law that I haven't heard of, where 
not only sweat-of-the-brow but also tear-in-the-eye is sufficient 
to prohibit copying of century old texts?

> wanted to go and do the work of scanning and indexing 
> themselves, the Society would have a more difficult time 
> claiming copyright, as the text itself is probably in the public 
> domain.

*Claiming* copyright (where none is due) is never difficult.  
Scammers, publishers and libraries do it all the time.  Truthful 
people call this copy*fraud*, because it just isn't *right*.

> The intellectual property comes with the work of arrangement, 
> cataloging and transferring to a new medium.

Not at all!  With cataloging come database rights[1] that expire 
after 15 years.  But this is not copyright.  And the transfer to a 
new medium is not an intellectual effort.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_rights


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se