[WikiEN-l] Copyright question

[Jussi-Ville Heiskanen]

Carcharoth wrote:
>
> Most of that is the sale of contemporary copyrighted photographs (by
> living photographers earning money from their trade). But some of that
> will be the commercial sale of scans of PD stuff that gets free
> culture people up in arms. The root of this issue is the commercial
> exploitation of the public domain.
>
> My view is that if people are prepared to spend time, money and effort
> in finding, collecting, keeping and conserving public domain material,
> and then scanning it and digitising it, then there is nothing to
> prevent people selling the end product of such labours. And people
> will pay for that service.
>
> Whether it is morally right to exploit the public domain (by selling
> such scans for money), and whether it is morally right to appropriate
> the scans made by others (by insisting the scans are also public
> domain), is something I can see arguments for on both sides of this
> divide.
>
>   

What is most striking to my mind in this issue of
use of images, is how the status quo differs from
that with regard to _texts_.

With texts, what you have are Project Gutenberg,
The Internet Archive, Wikisource etc. pretty much
all of them with some form of copyleft, or at least
not asserting silly Copyprotect rationales (total PD
in the case of PG, with merely the proviso of *not*
attributing if you don't include the full disclaimer
of the "license")

I do know there have been cases of good quality
scans of texts being hoarded, or being totally
disallowed in the past, such as the case of the
Dead Sea Scrolls, but I don't quite see them as
being relevant in this context.


Yours,

Jussi-Ville Heiskanen