Actually, I was shown this last night and it is possible to get the full
resolution images at full size, you just have to mess around with the url a
bit (basically, zoom in all the way, and at some point it says
fullimage=false, and you just change it to fullimage=true). The images are
huge and beautiful.
One might argue, however, that since the edges of the paper are shown, they
are images of three dimensional objects; however if someone is really
worried about that they could just cut off the margins, although that
decreases the value of the images somewhat.
I think this /is/ something that it's conceivable the foundation could get
sued over (IANAL), however in this case I think we'd be in the right,
previous case law has gone with our side, and I think it's worth it to
assert the larger communities right to freely see and use works which have
entered the public domain. Also, can you just imagine how many images this
would affect if the Foundation decided to get rid of all images which are
similar to this (high quality images of closely held public domain two
dimensional works)? We might as well shut down commons if that's the
decision.
Makemi