Ancient Books Go Online

jd writes "The BBC is reporting that the United Nations' World Digital Library has gone online with an initial offering of 1,200 ancient manuscripts, parchments and documents. To no great surprise, Europe comes in first with 380 items. South America comes in second with 320, with a very distant third place being given to the Middle East at a paltry 157 texts. This is only the initial round, so the leader board can be expected to change. There are, for example, a lot of Sumerian and Babylonian tablets, many of which are already online elsewhere. Astonishingly, the collection is covered by numerous copyright laws, according to the legal page. Use of material from a given country is subject to whatever restrictions that country places, in addition to any local and international copyright laws. With some of the contributions being over 8,000 years old, this has to be the longest copyright extension ever offered. There is nothing on whether the original artists get royalties, however."

Comments

Sounds about right

[Anonymous Coward]

Copyright seems to have an indefinite life these days...

Re:Sounds about right

[dov_0]

Perhaps the people who digitized or translated the works can copyright the 'new' work that they have 'created'.

Re:Sounds about right

[MrHanky]

Wrong. Translations are new works, and translations are covered by copyright. Derivative works, surely, but new and copyrightable works nonetheless. It's a situation not very dissimilar to a fork of a software project: the original author retains certain rights, and can stop the fork if it's unlicensed, but s/he doesn't get the full copyright to the fork.

Copyright

[Seriousity]

With some of the contributions being over 8,000 years old, this has to be the longest copyright extension ever offered.

Is anyone surprised at this? Seriously, does copyright ever end these days?

Re:Copyright

[Anonymous Coward]

Photos of uncopyrighted human works are themselves not copyrighted unless the photographer adds his own artistic expression through the angle, composition, lightning, scribbling or whatever the fuck else, at least in my country. You can't just scan it, burn the originals, and be good for another infinity years.

If you get a copyright on a scan/photo of a document, wouldn't you get copyright on a print as well? That would mean that when you print 5000 copies of a book, each one is a separate derivative work with it's own copyright, set from the year of printing.

Re:Was the racist overtone intended???

[Anonymous Coward]

Racist? What the hell does "race" have to do with it?

If you want to say it's geographically biased and unnecessarily inflammatory in that respect, fine, but geographic regions aren't races and identifying disparities between the contributions to this document collection from different regions so far isn't "racist".

Here's hoping they fill in the ones that are underrepresented a bit, because there are worthwhile contributions that could be made from almost everywhere in the world (although the degree to which ancient cultures used writing or it was preserved is quite variable, and, okay, there won't be any from Antarctica. Hopefully I won't be accused of being an anti-Antarctican "racist").

Yes tech....

[Max Romantschuk]

To the people tagging this !tech:

The success of technology is intimately tied to the free flow of information. Issues like there are important, because poorly designed restrictions inhibit our ability to make technological progress without spending a huge amount of resources on needless legal bickering.

If 8000-year-old documents are being withheld from the public domain there's a problem. A problem affecting both the richness of our culture and our ability to do science and apply it in the technology sector.

Re:Yes tech....

[drinkypoo]

If 8000-year-old documents are being withheld from the public domain there's a problem.

If 8,000 year old documents are being read it's a sign that we need to rethink hard drives.

Re:repository of copyrighted works?

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if you read "contributed" as "copyrighted".
In other words, they claim no such thing. What they do claim is that the work might be copyrighted, and it's your responsibility to find out before publishing anything. In the case of the photos they have that are dated 2004, they have a very good point.

Re:Was the racist overtone intended???

[clarkkent09]

Hmm, perhaps GP is overly sensitive but the tone of the summary does seem strange. I am all against holding back the truth for fear of offending someone's racial or (especially) religious sensitivities but I am not in favor of underhanded insults either.

Saying that it is "no surprise" that Europe comes first and Middle East comes last with a "paltry" number of manuscripts is completely unnecessary in this context and can easily be read as insulting to people in Middle East, with racism not far below the surface.

After all, East Asia has 81, Africa 122, North America 133 etc. why single out Middle East with 157, with words like "no surprise" and "paltry"?