On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 6:08 AM, <wjhon...@aol.com> wrote: > > In a message dated 1/15/2009 9:56:34 PM Pacific Standard Time, > mor...@gmail.com writes: > > You are copying the formula. There is no item itself to be "stolen".>> > > > ----- > > And no one is stopping anyone, from taking an old Bible and scanning it. > But if you want to come to my bible.org website and copy off all my scans of > old bibles and then post them up on your website, that is quite a different > thing. > > The simple fact that an underlying object is PD does not give carte blanche > to rehost someone else's photographs.
What if someone turns up on your doorstep with a scanner and says "your old bible is public domain information - I demand you let me scan it so I can set up a website to compete with your one". What then? The point here is that the availability of PD items (the actual items themselves, not the scans or copies of them) varies. There are also quality control and provenance issues as well. What would you prefer? A quality scan from a respected museum that has confirmed the provenance of an item and that it is genuine and not a fake, or a poor-quality scan from Joe Blogs who has found stuff in a second-hand bookshop and has no weight of authority behind him to confirm that the scan or the object are genuine? The usual solution to that is to point to the museum/library/archive image as a way to verify the self-created image (similar to how people point to Google Books now to verify books they are using as references). But what if there is no museum/library/archive image? Carcharoth _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
