[Wikipedia-l] 1911 encyclopedia

[Axel Boldt]

>> Probably, they will claim some kind of copyrights over the 
>> digitalisation of the 1911 Encyclopedia.

>That's not possible from the point of view of the copyright law as
>scanning is not a creative expression and the copyright of the
>original material has expired. The only thing which is possible is to
>claim copyright on additional markup, layout, presentation and
>additional graphics.

I think they fully deserve the legal copyright on their markup,
layout, presentation and additional graphics :-)

More seriously: even if the quality of the scanned text will be
improved, I do hope that nobody will whip together a script to suck
the 1911 contents into Wikipedia wholesale. Every article needs to
be read, checked for OCR mistakes, accuracy and outdated language,
wikified and merged with whatever material we already have on the
topic. Many technical articles will be useless because the terminology
has changed. In mathematics for instance, it is next to impossible to
read a paper that was written in the 19th century.

Axel