[Foundation-l] Re: Hosting scans of the 1911 Britannica on Wikimedia

Thu Nov 10 22:05:44 UTC 2005

Tim Starling wrote:

>The CD/DVD sets are apparently quite rare, Brian was lucky to get his hands
>on one at a fairly cheap price.
>
Not really.

>There's the trademark issue -- Britannica may attempt to scare us with legal
>threats over this. A disclaimer on every HTML page declaring non-affiliation
>with Britannica would probably put us on sound legal footing, although I'd
>be willing to hear advice about this from people who are more knowledgeable.
>If the "LoveToKnow Free Online Encyclopedia" (1911encyclopedia.org) can host
>this content, then we should be able to find a way too. And we can do it
>without the abominable license restrictions and "copyright traps" scattered
>throughout the work to enforce them.
>
It may turn out that their copyright traps are really their lack of OCR 
proofreading. :-)

>Wikipedia owes a lot to the 1911 edition -- we've copied many of its
>articles. A public, canonical copy will be a valuable tool to deal with
>LoveToKnow's frequent OCR errors, its incompleteness, and its specious legal
>threats against us based on our use of unspecified copyright material hidden
>in their doctored online copy. Hopefully the availability of page images
>will spur development of a complete and accurate OCR copy.
>
Someone with a legitimate copyright claim does not need to hide traps in 
the text.  Doing so cannot create new copyrights in the test, although 
they still have a copyright in the surrounding framework.  I would go so 
far as to say that changing text for the sake of hidden copyrights may 
be a violation of the original author's moral rights.

Ec