Carcharoth wrote: > 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? > > I don't worry too much about book scans. I suppose that a determined person could fake these if he had good reason to be so motivated, but those circumstances would be a definite exception. Joe Blogs's scans will very often be of poor quality, but where only text is concerned are probably suitable to the intended purpose. Companies like Google are getting involved because it's too much for limited library budgets, and volunteer help is probably not reliable enough to handle such a huge mindless task. There are further access problems when we are dealing with fragile material on acidic paper. Books that have come out in multiple editions present a lot of additional problems about what it means to be a genuine.version.
I view the public domain as a trust with the general public as the beneficiary. It is the underlying rationale behind the public ownership of US government copyrights, and to free admission to national museums in Washington: the taxpayer already paid for all this with his taxes, so why should he pay again to see it and use it where possible. Pointing to Google Books is one thing when our usage does not involve changing the material. If we want to do more with it like producing derivatives, we need to host it elsewhere. This makes me wonder if there is a place at the bailout trough for rebuilding the intellectual infrastructure. ;-) Ec _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
