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

[geni]

On 9/28/06, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
>
> 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?

Well UK law does have the moral rights bit but that is unlikely to
appy in this case.

>
> *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*.

In this case there is an argument to be made that under english and
welsh law the scans are covered by copyright so the message at the
start of this thread is reasonable.

> 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

Under UK law you can probably also pick up 20 years for rearrangement
of text you do any of that (under typographical arrangements).

-- 
geni