[Opengenalliance] old bailey proceedings

Rufus Pollock rufus.pollock at okfn.org
Fri May 13 14:01:06 BST 2011


On 13 May 2011 12:50, Javier Ruiz <javier at openrightsgroup.org> wrote:
> Hi
> There is a very interesting website with the proceedings of The Old Bailey,
> which however illustrates many of the copyright issues we need to clarify in
> relation to genealogy.
> The effect of digitisation of public domain historical documents seems to be
> in effect a "copyright reset". So texts form 1674 are now restricted. It is
> not even clear what that copyright is trying to protect. Is all this proper
> at least?

This is copyright in scans not in original texts. While there is some
legal debate as to whether scans obtain copyright asserting such a
copyright is standard stuff and no one has yet challenged Graves case
successfully in the UK yet.

> http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Legal-info.jsp

See discussion in the CKAN entry for this dataset:

<http://ckan.net/package/oldbaileyonline>

This situation is typical of most scanning document projects (i.e.
copyright is retained and the results are very rarely openly
licensed).

Rufus

[1]: http://www.opendefinition.org/



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