The British Library Puts Over 1M Images in the Public Domain | Hacker News Reader

The British Library Puts Over 1M Images in the Public Domain

openculture.com

216 pointsbenbreen11 comments

Interesting... but the million images were released in December 2013.

http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2013...

Maybe someone's been counting them this whole time and just got to the end.

To be clear, the images are already in the public domain; that is, they are not restricted by copyright. The British Library has, however, made accessible these public domain images via a web interface.

Their status as images belonging to the public is not related to their being made accessible by the British Library.

Note that at least in some countries just scanning may be considered enough work that the scanned version is again under copyright.

See the questionable German Projekt Gutenberg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projekt_Gutenberg-DE

The wikipedia article is a bit thin on details - for example are they claiming their compilation is a new copyright (it most likely is) or are they claiming their individual scans of historic works each are copyright to them?

Is there a proper English language discussion of any court case in which this has been tested for this particular claim?

For reference this http://www.jcms-journal.com/articles/10.5334/jcms.1021217/ is quite a good review of the NPG vs Coetzee non-case [English law] and the Bridgeman vs Corel case [USA law].

You're confusing US and UK Law. US case law tends to favour the view that scanned documents become public domain, there is no such case law in the UK.

In particular the BL position is that due to the proprietary scanning technology they use they inherit copyright on the new works. You could potentially challenge that position in court, but at the moment there's no evidence for how a court will treat it.

in case if anyone interested in the mechanical curator bot source code: https://github.com/BL-Labs/embellishments

There's also an RSS feed of findings: http://mechanicalcurator.tumblr.com/rss

Related: does anyone know the "best practise" around digitising photos and images? What file format is used? What scanning equipment? What's the standard resolution/DPI used?

Not sure I can advise on the best practice, but I know how NOT to do it: my buddy just told me that a family member spent untold hours digitizing decades of family photos and documents... all at a resolution of 1024x768. headdesk

Replying to myself: I found this document which lays out how archive.org do it.

https://archive.org/details/ProcessDocument

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