[Opengenalliance] old bailey proceedings

[Javier Ruiz]

Thanks for the replies. The reason why I asked the original question is
because it seemed that photographs are clear but scans not. It only gets
greyer and farcical, at least in UK.

Would it be worth challenging the copyright of scans of historical public
domain documents and clarify it once for all?

Could the public domain aspect be considered in parallel with the question
of whether a scan is an artful photograph or a humble photocopy?

Legal arguments aside. If ancient documents are digitised and then locked
back in their respective archives and the results of the exercise are
copyrighted, this is a loss for the public domain. Maybe we need to
distinguish between copies where the original remains and when the analog
copy is destroyed. I spoke to someone recently about the TNA trying to burn
IWW medal records after making microfiches, this would mean the only records
available would have been the new format. This surely is some copyright
reset.

Then the next thing to clarify is whether the transcription of the text in
scans will owe some cumulative copyright to the images.

I.e. can I just transcribe any originally public domain text from scans if I
can physically see them online or otherwise or can I be prevented from doing
so?

Must I pay author rights to the owner of a scan if I transcribe and sell a
book with public domain information from scans?

Then is clarifying the copyright of transcriptions.

The copyright of the transcriptions themselves seems to depend on the skill
required, so that in theory a transcription of mediaeval texts would be
closer to copyright than modern type.

What happens if I make a transcription that is identical letter by letter to
another transcription? The PRS in relation to folk music transcriptions
claims that identical transcriptions would have independent copyrights:
http://www.prsformusic.com/creators/wanttojoin/how_it_works/arrangements/Pages/arrangements.aspx

How can this work in practice? Anyone can then copy and claim they have an
identical transcription. Maybe before computers this could be proved, but it
seems nonsense to me to try to sustain this argument in the digital milieu.

On another possible option, what if we OCR the scans and then corrected the
computer generated texts by looking up the existing transcriptions only to
check for some words? Or even better get a computer to do it?

Then if the transcriptions are organised and indexed is the database right.

Ben Laurie was mentioning the other day that with computer power nowadays it
may be easier to put certain materials in a single text file and use search
tools, rather than databases. Could we just dump the text into a file this
way without replicating the database structure and bypass the database right
if the database contents are public domain texts?

TBH I seems apparent that copyright law may be a bit of a dead end in UK as
a tool to fight for digital versions of public records to remain in the
public domain, and this is mostly an issue of policy, particularly as we are
dealing with publicly funded institutions. It would be good to exhaust
all possibilities though.

best, Javier

On 13 May 2011 13:19, David Mayall <david.mayall at googlemail.com> wrote:

>  I don’t see any copyright reset.
>
>
>
> The copyright status of the original documents is (and must be) unchanged.
>
>
>
> What I do see is a claim that the newly digitised images of those documents
> are a copyright work.
>
>
>
> There is nothing new about such a claim, and all suppliers of digitised
> images tend to include a similar claim.
>
>
>
> As Francis has already noted, such a claim lies in the grey area, It is
> neither rock solid, nor completely outlandish to assume that creating a
> digital image of something will create a new copyright in that digital
> image. The key question will probably be “does creating an image that can
> stand in place of the original require skill as opposed to simple mechanical
> action”.
>
>
>
>
>  ------------------------------
>
> *From:* Javier Ruiz [mailto:javier at openrightsgroup.org]
> *Sent:* 13 May 2011 12:50
> *To:* Organising list for Open Genealogy Alliance; ORG legal discussions
> *Subject:* [Opengenalliance] old bailey proceedings
>
>
>
> 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?
>
>
>
> http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Legal-info.jsp
>
>
>
> What do you think?
>
>
>
> Javier
>
>
>
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>
>
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