British Library has released over a million images onto Flickr Commons
britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk
britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk
> These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books
> digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images into
> the Public Domain.
However, Microsoft was under no obligation to share the scanned images publicly, and it was generous of them to do so. But this is different to dedicating a work protected by copyright to tbe public domain, e.g. using the CC0 dedication [0]. To gift a work to the public domain, you must first hold the copyright of that work.
The distinction may seem pedantic to some, but it seems important to me.
Sure you are. Just not interested enough to Google the specific case that was helpfully referenced in the comment you replied to.
*And it was argued that the same result would have held in the UK.
That is exactly what you asked for: a specific example of US law being more lenient than the law in other countries.
Also, the US uses trade treaties to cajole other countries into adopting very restrictive copyright doctrines. It's more common than you'd think.
However, I'm not aware of anywhere where copyright lasts longer than the US (except in special cases like Peter Pan[1], even if that is really just perpetual rights to royalties from performance[2]).
Edit: Just noticed that [2] says copyright in Mexico is actually longer than in the US, but I'm not aware of the specifics of how it works.
[1] http://www.jmbarrie.co.uk/copyright/
[2] http://www.gosh.org/gen/peterpan/copyright/faq/#Copyright
There are also entire classes of IP protection which the US doesn't recognise but are common elsewhere, for example sui generis rights.
For copyright specifically (not IP in general, and definitely not patents), the US is very soft.
For instance many mainland euro country have a concept of Author's Rights (or moral rights), which may well be perpetual, inalienable, unwaivable and unassignable (in a company, the moral rights belong to the employee who created the work, the company has an exclusive license to the economy rights of the work). In french law, moral rights provide 4 sub-rights:
* divulgation right, the author is sole holder of the right to decide the original disclosure of the work
* paternity right, respect must be given to the parental relation between the author and the work
* work respect right, the author can forbid any and all transformative work. This alone means "fair use" is much, much broader in the US than in France
* repent right, even after divulgation the author can "uncirculate" the work (although he may have to compensate license holders)
and because these moral rights are perpetual and inalienable, you can't put something in the public domain in France, you can only provide a universal license. The work will only fall in the public domain once copyright has expired.
The equivalent would be if Starbucks, the coffee shop, only served inferior quality coffee at a ridiculously high price … wait a minute …
I'm not sure it's really an appropriate place for entrepreneurs unless they are interested in accessing or using the books somehow. When all the other libraries have shut down or turned into Internet access centers, this one will still be valuable as a repository of the books we choose to keep as physical artefacts.
There are a lot of talented Brits in the Bay Area, but there are also many great UK based programmers and companies in the UK who could have developed a home-grown solution. This is embarrassing on many levels.
Would that have been more cost effective?
That said, seeing how the images are creative commons licensed, it would still make sense to put them on flickr, too :P The more, the merrier.
Why shouldn't they? It's to everyone's benefit for these to be as widely distributed as reasonably possible.
> There are a lot of talented Brits in the Bay Area, but there are also many great UK based programmers and companies in the UK who could have developed a home-grown solution.
These folks can now use the Flickr API to download each and every one of the photos and code to their hearts' content.
Because Flickr could one day be shut down, and eventually will be, however far on the future that may be. For resources like this such a disruption will be painful.
I'm not saying it is a bad idea, only that I understand the long-term hesitation in this.
IMO the U.S. Library of Congress does it right. They do actually have a Flickr page, for people who prefer that interface: http://www.flickr.com/photos/library_of_congress/sets/
But there is also the canonical digital archive at: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/
We don't know what the future of Yahoo and Flickr will be. The terms of the deal could change drastically down the road, especially if Yahoo/Flickr get new owners.
There are also legal issues. Visitors from around the world will be accessing data from a US company as opposed to a UK organization bounded by UK and EU data protection laws (for what that's worth!).
As for the "terms of the deal" - that is only relevant if nobody bothers to download these images now. The images are all so old that the originals are out of copyright, and as far as I can see, the British Library have tagged them all "no known copyright restrictions", as Microsoft, who did the scanning, donated them to the public domain.
So these complaints are meaningless: Have a concern about the hosting? Mirror the images. As I'm sure various people will.
Even if Flickr were to shut down tomorrow, British Library still have them, and likely Microsoft too. And the books they are from still exists. It is the British Librarys job to ensure the preservation of the source material -, and they can provide them to other parties.
The governments will be spying either way though, so I personally don't think it's much of a difference.
Which is precisely why it's good services like Flickr host stuff like this. The more services - private and public - that do, the less likely a shutdown will shut off access.
Most taxpayers, even if they agree with you, are likely to be more worried by the prospect of the British Library developing its own tools for access to its digital collections when perfectly adequately ones already exist.
By leveraging Flickr, the library frees itself of the problems of dealing with tens of millions of users attempting to access its material. Memory institutions have centuries of experience dealing with the lone, dedicated researcher. They're less used to dealing with massive number of researchers accessing collections at the same time.
We already have an open and free technology for that: Bittorrent.
But, hey, you cut out the evil evil American company Flickr (boo), so everybody's better off.
I'm of two minds as to whether this has been a good thing. On one hand it's digitised content that was previously only in paper form, but on the other that content is now charged for, and likely will remain so for a long time due to contracts. Effectively it has been put back into copyright.
Flickr is a perfectly reasonable tool for the job.
Several major museums and libraries (including the US's National Archives) have donated major collections.
> We plan to launch a crowdsourcing application at the beginning of next year, to help describe what the images portray. Our intention is to use this data to train automated classifiers that will run against the whole of the content. The data from this will be as openly licensed as is sensible (given the nature of crowdsourcing) and the code, as always, will be under an open licence.
That said, I am very pleased to read the other reply that mentioned their plans. I'm not waiting, though. I'm very excited to dive in immediately.
It's good that they put it up on the internet, apart from just the exposure (someone sitting half a world away seeing them), but also they could be used by someone now.