On 30/01/16 18:03, Jez Nicholson wrote: > Andy, I respectfully beg to differ. Crown copyright does expire after 50 > years but owners of scans claim 'sweat of the brow' grants them > copyright of the images made. Even the people at NPE Maps claim it > http://www.npemap.org.uk/tileLicence.html but they renounce any claim on > derived data. > > I don't necessarily agree that simply scanning something is fair grounds > for copyright ownership. Professional quality scans and georectifying > does cost money though.
Neither do the courts ... Although I could not find the link I was looking for. The courts have basically rejected the idea that simply scanning a document restores it's copyright. There has to be 'substantial new material' and then only that new material - such as perhaps providing translations of names - can be copyright? Paying to use the facilities to access scanned documents is not unreasonable, it is only the claim to 'ownership via copyright' which is not enforceable by law? https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/request_justification_of_claims makes interesting reading, but the arguments do seem floored ... and some key links no longer work. That the resulting archive has a database of OCR translations which is their IP sort of overrides the the complaint, although the quality is sometimes rather suspect and does need better quality checking. If one is having to pay a substantial sum to access data then it's quality should match. It is questionable though if material that should be freely available via the British Library should now be the base for a third party chargeable service? The National Library of Scotland does seem to be doing a much better job for the UK than the British Library is? With much more open access while almost inevitably having to charge for things that the British Library should perhaps be providing? -- Lester Caine - G8HFL ----------------------------- Contact - http://lsces.co.uk/wiki/?page=contact L.S.Caine Electronic Services - http://lsces.co.uk EnquirySolve - http://enquirysolve.com/ Model Engineers Digital Workshop - http://medw.co.uk Rainbow Digital Media - http://rainbowdigitalmedia.co.uk _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
