Vatican, Oxford put ancient manuscripts online | Hacker News Reader

Vatican, Oxford put ancient manuscripts online

cbc.ca

30 pointshawkharris10 comments

Non-commercial license. What a shame.

In parts of the European Union, the CC-NC provision essentially amounts to a complete uselessness of the document, because of the weird definitions of the word "commercial".

For instance, here in Germany, if you have a blog, no advertisements, make no money out of it, but you have thousands of followers, you are acting in "commercial scope" (ie. you are too successful to be non-commercial), thus inviting all the nastyness of being sued for commercial copyright infringement.

The only thing I can do with a CC-NC document without legal risk is to look at it.

The sad thing is, that now nobody will bother to scan these documents and put them online under a different license, since "they are already out there for free!!".

It is quite likely that nobody involved with the project knew this, which goes to show how dangerous the NC-provision is.

Perhaps the claimed copyright is groundless, on the basis the the scanned documents are well into the public domain [1]? Presumably the libraries are striving for faithful reproduction, which would imply no creative step, and a number of jurisdictions don't recognise "sweat of the brow" as being reason enough for copyright[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyfraud

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow

a number of jurisdictions don't recognise "sweat of the brow"

A number of juristicions do though. Including (maybe) the UK.

What if your blog is hosted in America or other state?

Also if license is in English, the English definition of 'commercial' should apply. It should be translated 'for profit' to German.

I am not a christian, but IMO this is a pretty cool effort. More such ancient manuscripts should be made available online. These are important artifacts and should be made available to the general public, without requiring them to travel to a specific Museum.

Personally, I am interested in Da Vinci's Codex Atlanticus. Is that available yet?

Is this not what you want? http://www.leonardodigitale.com/index.php?lang=ENG

Well instead of flagging my comment, I think it would be more constructive if you present your opinion and engage in discussion.

Try to ignore single downvotes (these are not flags).

The buttons are small and people often hit the wrong one. Especially on mobile.

exactly. I have accidentally downvoted more than one pg comments, for example.

Wow, now we know how how those withered, barely readable tomes in your RPG should look like: http://bav.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/icv/page.php?book=ms._barocci_2...

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