[Opengenalliance] old bailey proceedings

[Ben Brumfield]

On Fri, May 13, 2011 at 8:01 AM, Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org> wrote:
> 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 The effect of digitisation of public domain historical documents seems to be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/
>
Although none of the authors have done this,  be careful not to look
at US law when researching the status of UK or EU scanned texts.  The
UK does not have the straightforward precedent of Bridgeman v. Corel,
in which a "slavish copy" retains the copyright status of the
original, and in addition the status  of works under "Crown copyright"
seems quite different from the US public domain.

This caused a lot of confusion on DH Answers a few months ago:
http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/who-follows-best-practices-re-restrictions-on-digitized-public-domain-works

Ben