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Comment by ng7j5d9 | Hacker News Reader

IANAL but the prominent

   (c) The Royal Collection Trust

overlaid on each map caught my attention.

Shouldn't these very old maps be in the public domain?

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It'll be the digital (and any physical) reproductions that will be subject to copyright, not the maps themselves.

No. At least in the US, an exact replication of a public domain work is also public domain. They may be claiming public domain, but it wouldn't hold up in a US court of law (no idea about elsewhere).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....

Now, if someone makes a database of digitized old books in some particular category, whose compilation required creativity and originality, that work might fall under copyright. But just a digitized book? No.

The usual touchstone case in this area in the US is Bridgeman v. Corel, which came down on the side of "no copyright" for these kinds of reproductions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel....

That's an appeals-court level decision so there's some wiggle room to claim that the rule on reproductions isn't totally settled. UK law is a little different and, to my knowledge, somewhat less hostile than US law to a "sweat of the brow" argument about the labor and skill required to produce something possibly bringing about copyright protection. Still, my understanding is that the current situation in the UK is much the same as in the US.

Regardless, it's still fairly common for museums and archives in the US and UK to assert copyright in scans and reproductions they produce, even if they generally don't ultimately follow through in court. There was a high-profile dust-up between the National Portrait Gallery of London and a user who was uploading high-resolution images to Wikimedia Commons, which resulted in much saber-rattling but no actual case.

Simply making the content unavailable and requiring agreement to a contract or set of terms seems to be the main method currently in use for these institutions to try to maintain their revenue streams from reproductions.

My guess is that the "revenue streams" from reproductions of public domain content are (1) negligible to begin with, and (2) might even be higher for many institutions under a permissive policy, since paying for the institution's implied endorsement would still be a highly-sought-after signal for most serious commercial reusers. Many institutions are starting to realize this, even in Europe where these overblown copyright claims used to be even more common.

I think this is true mostly, but not all cultural heritage institutions are on the same page here. I work on some sites that serve the cultural heritage community, and last time I talked to some of our larger contributors, reproduction rights were still a revenue stream that was large enough to want to maintain. For some contributors, it is not worth their time to try and deal with licensing.

Interesting...and looks like I'm wrong. I'd always assumed digital reproductions held copyright.

Sadly I can't edit my comment now to acknowledge my erroneous assumption. zerocrates comment below links to the Bridgeman case which has in fact a section on UK copyright:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel...

Interestingly the RCT "Copyright" page:

https://www.rct.uk/about/policies/copyright

...is fairly specific about restrictions on "Commercial" use of their images, not non-commercial use which by omission in their statement would suggest you're free to do as you wish:

Any commercial use of the images on this website is subject to written permission from Royal Collection Trust and the applicable Licence Terms and Conditions displayed on this site. In particular, but without limitation, no images may be reproduced, communicated to the public, distributed, re-used or extracted from this website for commercial use (including without limitation any storage, reproduction, linking or indexing for the purposes of any search engines) without the prior written consent of Royal Collection Trust.

Whether that would hold up in court, I've no idea.

The National Library of Scotland (a tremendous resource for old maps) has a pretty decent and fairly clear statement on re-use/licensing:

https://maps.nls.uk/copyright.html

Again, Commercial Use of some sources (via third parties such as Ordnance Survey) mentions you need to get permission.

some folks have claimed that digital reproductions have their own rights (esp. if cleaned up or "digital development" of negatives was done) , but I've heard that called "copyfraud" -- it is a big issue in the cultural heritage institutions who want license fees as a revenue stream. Most publishers are willing to pay for reproduction rights, even if they are not needed, just to be on the safe side.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyfraud

Another wrinkle is that the copyright clock traditionally starts at the time a work is published. So, unpublished manuscripts are not necessarily in the public domain, even if they were written 100s of years ago. If these were the King's personal maps, and just now published, they might still be under copyright.

Some countries have a special copyright status for a 'first' publication of unpublished historical content, called editio princeps. But the conditions for that to apply are somewhat stringent; a widely-copied manuscript would be considered to have been 'published' for example. In the US, AIUI, copyright on an unpublished work would run out 120 years after creation.

> So, unpublished manuscripts are not necessarily in the public domain, even if they were written 100s of years ago.

This may well be the case in the UK, but this assertion would likely not apply in the US, for multiple reasons. For one thing, manuscripts that have been displayed in a museum would be counted as published. Also, in the US copyright expires 120 years following creation, at the very latest.

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