[Opengenalliance] old bailey proceedings

[Ben Brumfield]

On Sat, May 14, 2011 at 12:48 AM, Guy Etchells <guy.etchells at virgin.net> wrote:
> Ben you missed the rest of the point "or as many do these day place

That's fair, but in a discussion of  whether OGA or ORA should be
involved in targeted copyright reform, the feasibility of a US-style
system  is worth studying in detail.

>>> conditions of use on their images and database "
>
> It is the fact that the companies are allowed to impose licence conditions
> that allows these companies to profit from digitisation.
> Such licencing works as an extension of copyright and is in fact far more
> restrictive than copyright.

Again, the conditions an Ancestry.com imposes are not license
conditions per se, nor are they "an extension of copyright", since
under US law reproductions of public domain material are not
copyrightable.

In some ways this contractual arrangement is more restrictive, in
other ways it's not.  Ancestry.com has the freedom to impose the
200-per-year restriction because their restrictions are imposed via
contract, not copyright.  How would they be able to do this if they
asserted copyright over those scans and transcriptions?  They would
have to selectively license each document to the downloading user with
consideration of whether the user has reached their yearly limits or
not.   In order to allow their users to do whatever they wanted with
the documents--including republication--they'd have to attach that
license to all down-stream uses, even if the license simply said "user
may re-publish at will".  And if the document were digitized by a
third party, the company might not even be allowed to grant their
users that use, as I suspect is the case with the Old Bailey Online.

I'm not saying that a system based on copyright  creation in PD scans
is impossible--obviously it does work in the UK--but there are
alternative models that allow a lot more freedom to the public while
still allowing private digitization companies to thrive.  Whether it's
worth OGA's effort is another question entirely.

Ben Brumfield
Austin, Texas
http://manuscripttranscription.blogspot.com/