[WikiEN-l] Copyright question

[John Vandenberg]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 11:04 PM, Jussi-Ville
Heiskanen<cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Libraries and librarians promote wide distribution, so there is almost
a race to see who can digitise books first.  The culture within these
organisations is different, and mean that even their rare works are
digitised, but that is more expensive due to the need to be extremely
careful.  From their perspective, providing a very high res image to
the world means that the original will not be requested very often,
which will extend its life.

Historical societies usually adopt a stance more similar to the
museums, because they have lots of interesting texts in their
collections which are unique, _and_ they are looking for ways to stay
afloat.

The art world is very different because it has been based on limited
distribution (prints) of "good" art, as opposed to wide distribution
of works of even dubious value, as happens with books.

--
John Vandenberg