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Disclaimer: I have not RTFA, because it seems to be /.ed, although I only ried once.

The British Library Sound Archive has apparantly ammased 2.5 million recordings.

The late John Peel had a large library of music, much of which he never found the time to listen to. This may be going to Sound Archive.

This guy, 'The Music Man', has some way to go. And, his recordings are illigal downloads.

While we're talking about the British Library, it's worth mentioning that they've just redone their catalogue search facility, and it is now excellent (and it works in FireFox). You can search their entire copyright library for free here:

http://catalogue.bl.uk/

You can even use the site to order offprints of articles, book chapters, etc. from their Document Supply Centre. Very, very handy.

Would this be the same British Library that was going to archive the whole UK web?

As the library publish their email format and the article had the fellow's full name in it I've dropped him a email pointing him to here, and to ebay. Hopefully he'll post a list of what he needs.

Hang out the flags -- this is a brilliant project. It would be a huge benefit to society, even if works still in copyright were not made freely available. And the benefits are not limited to the English-speaking world, just as that world has benefited from plenty of material not written in English originally.

I hope the Library of Congress are already scanning all books where there is reason to suspect they have the only copy. There are plenty more where this is our best hope of being able to read the contents in a reaonable timeframe. There are millions of books which are not 'rare' but for which this will provide the most convenient form of access. I hope they work out that cooperation with Operation Gutenberg should multiply the good effects of both projects.

A good companion project would be a campaign to honor those authors who voluntarily put their works into the public domain before the last tendrils of copyright law relinquish their grip.

It is good that the UK's equivalent, the British Library is involved in a project which will preserve and copy endangered archives around the world. The budget is not on the same scale though! http://www.bl.uk/cgi-bin/press.cgi?story=1418 (and the story mentions that the charity part-funding the programme is also trying to preserve endangered languages).

I'm a registered Libertarian and I thought that being a libertarian meant that one believes that less government is better government. That the government runs in the way the Constitution, Bill of Rights, Articles of Confederation, and the Magna Carta meant if to run. Libertarians don't believe like the government of the State of Utah, that the separation of church and state is one city block.

Yeah he'd only bullied his way into Checkoslovakia, replaced a democratic government with a dictatorship and arranged the assasination of less than a hundred of his political enemies over a period of a few days.

As far as the Jews had gone he had merely made them where badges, and had only burnt a scant handful of synagogues and denied Jews citizenship and the protection of the courts. Maybe a couple of other things, but hardly anything else at all really.

Obviously a model leader for 1938, I'm sure Time magazine are very proud.

By encrypting your data, you are bringing unnecessary suspicion upon yourself. I wouldn't be surprised if the FBI's powers are enhanced to include surveillance of you and your data.

Using your logic you would approve of the old KGB or the FBI's COINTELPRO tactics. On the same vein I guess we should just do a BCS on every airline passenger and stuff'em into an orange jumpsuit to guard against another 9/11 hijacking. What you are advocating is a "prison state". By your words you want to remove the following from the US Constitution:

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

My great-grandfather, who was killed by Mussolini fighting to save his country, is spinning in his grave.

My facts come from grad school students at a British university that were studying UK/US law differences.

Unfortunately, I don't recall which university it was - it was a brother of a flatmate when I was in College in London.

And who said that just because an American made a pilgrimage to the UK to see it, that it actually exists?

P.S. If you're talking about the Magna Carta, that isn't really a bill of rights - just a fix-up for some specific problems at one time in a long-past feudal society.

Right here

Ironic that DARPA has hired "MetaCarta" for its global surveillance, while the "Magna Carta" is the cornerstone of individual liberty and freedom from tyranny of the state. Never has limited government meant such unlimited government.

"WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH"
- Karl Rove (just kidding)

Sorry, but code can very well be free expression.

If I take something that is commonly available to anyone and render it in a unique or special way, is it art?

How about repurposing copyrighted or protected media into new forms? Is that art.

I may not think everything produced is art, but who am I to judge what is or is not creative expression? That is the slippery slope raised by this case.

http://prodigi.bl.uk/gutenbg/default.asp

(the JS doesn't seem to work on Moz - go to here for first page.

There's a whole lot of digitized early books and manuscripts out there. For one thing, there are no copyright issues, and they can often be the biggest hurdle in a digitization project. Check out some of our digitized material.

a few years ago one paper, one vellum. Both copies are online in a readable form ( 1045 / 2048 ) and can be viewed side by side. See them here They actually constitute a usefull research tool in this form as all the text including margin notes is readable via the web, assuming you can read latin of course. It's always nice to see things like this being put up on the web for all to use, but the texas copy one is a little redundant in this instance.

Also, in the British Museum version you can enlarge the pages enough so you can actually read them.

Inquiries regarding the availability of higher-resolution digital images for research or publication should be directed to the Center's staff. I think they'll probably offer a CDROM for purchase. The images on the site are 600x875 pixels, 187k jpegs.

The British Library has scans of two editions, with pages at 1450x2048 pixels, 851kb jpegs; almost sharp enough to forge a copy (they're worth about $20m).

Yes -- what's special is that it's one of the first printed books in Europe. The cultural impact on the free dissemination of information was much greater than that of the Internet. (Yes, books were still expensive, but much more numerous and affordable than hand scribed ones.)

the photographs provided by the HRC are not detailed enough to make out the text clearly.

Following a hint in the story, I found the British Library's edition, which is much nicer. (Though on UTexas they say you can get high res images on application; I suspect that means buying a CDROM.)

You mean like one of these?

There are only three copies in the United States. It's currently believed that only 51 out of the original 200 copies still exist. The sad part about this story is that the British Museum has two complete copies and put them on the webalmost 3 years ago. So UTexas posting them really adds nothing to the web, except provide another mirror.

Which original?

This is a copy, confirmed by Edward I in 1297, and on display at the National Archives in DC.

Do you have historical evidence to back that up?

He was wrong. It was the first Gutenberg book.
Find "Song of Solomon" in your favorite Bible. (The preceding link is to the appropriate Gutenberg image. I don't know German, but I know several related languages and it looks like it starts at the "O".)

IANAL, but if I undestand correctly, the great deal of Western law is based on 'common law', the practice of allowing previous court decisions to affect future decisions.

That is a very limited point of view. Napolonic law is also widely used.

Since digital technology has forever completely erased the possibility of having a finite supply of any kind of information, the length and breadth of copyright law is dying-- screaming, kicking, doing it's best to cling to existance in a scary new world inhospitable to it, but dying nonetheless.

How is digital technology anything more than a continuation of the development of techologies that made information cheaper to reproduce that started in the 15th century?

Maybe 500 was an exaggeration (given that the printing press was about that old)...
Actually, there are books that pre-date the printing press. The oldest printed book still around is The Diamond Sutra, at The British Library. It dates from 868AD.

It may also be the oldest existing Open Source document:

The colophon, at the inner end, reads: `Reverently [caused to be] made for universal free distribution by Wang Jie...

Universal owns it all now. For a good list of who owns who, see this page.

...was the Bible

In the UK, the first two rules already exist, hence there is only one 1 letter domain (x.co.uk), and a few 2 letter domains (bt.co.uk, f9.co.uk) that were allocated before Nominet came in to manage the namespace.

Also, how many anomalous names are there? www.bl.uk is one - are there more? (There's stuff like www.parliament.uk and www.police.uk which are presumably post-Nominet and deliberate, but I guess that bl.uk is a relic ... ?

(BTW, this new anti-troll device is really annoying. It blocks posts from subnets where there has been a lot of down-moderated activity in the last 24 hours. So if you have the same ISP as a lot of trolls, then you can't post (unless you log into university machines :-) I really hope they refine the bloody thing ASAP - it seems silly to block posts from people whose karma is high. Off-topic, I know, but I guess there's hundreds of people who want to say this but can't.)

This is probably as good a place as any to mention the Dead Media Project ...
--

I like the fact that they also scanned related items such as an indulgence, one of the fund raising schemes which precipitated the end of the Catholic Monopoly, and the start of the reformation.

--Mike--

While producing the Bible, Gutenberg's team learned fast about the economy of printing. This is reflected in differences between various copies of the Bible.

Three major changes of plan can be detected :

1.It was first envisaged that rubrics should be printed in red. This was soon abandoned, perhaps to save time.

2.It was decided to increase the number of lines per page, presumably to save paper.

3.It was decided to increase the print-run, but as some sheets had already been printed in the number first envisaged, these pages had to be printed again. This is the best explanation for why a number of the pages exist in two different versions.

Times haven't changed that much, now have they?

--

Although I don't usually find bibles terribly exciting, this thing's a real work of art. Pity they don't make books like that these days.

Incidentally, there is another one (from the University of Keio (Japan) here.

One of the reasons for digitising is to preserve old volumes. Wider access for people is another stated reason.