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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."
Surprisingly, as time goes by, the amount of ancient material available INCREASES every year. Old texts that are found and discovered are digitized and released to the world, rather than being lost in obscurity, readable by a small handful until the ultimate demise of the original work.
I see this every day.
For example, years back, when I was in High School, I was a big fan of "alternative" music. Bands like Depeche Mode, Erasure, Bauhaus, and others were my meat and potatoes, but being raised in small-town, USA, I had to work like the pretty hard to find stuff to listen to. My specialty was rare concert mixes and exploratory remixes - in many cases, I resigned to dubbing cassettes in order to get my fix.
Today, it's much easier for me to find rare, concert remixes! Many (most?) are available in mere seconds a la YouTube, as well as MP3s by LimeWire! And it seems that with each year, more and more and more obscure stuff is available - from Jerry Lee Lewis concerts to Arlo Guthrie live to early stage mixes of Yaz (then "Yazoo") ...
Why is this so?
Take a look at the Long Tail Economics principle made possible by the network effect of the Internet. This is one of the most insightful articles that exists on the Internet!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
The bit about copyright on the "legal" page is just boilerplate. All it means is that the presentation of a document on this site doesn't necessarily make it public domain or grant some other license, that the owners of the original document retain whatever rights they have. The copyright laws of individual countries are only valid within that country - you only need to concern yourself with your own country's laws. There are indeed a lot of problems with excessive copyright in the world, but the copyright concerns in the post are much ado about nothing.
The submitter hopefully says "to no great surprise" as a common way of acknowledging the occidentalizing tendencies of western academic and political traditions, of which the United Nations by virtue of its failed father the League of Nations clearly is. That whole colonization/empire thing that Europe was doing... before America got in the game with Cuba, Puerto Rico, Panama, the Philippines, and so on, led to a perspective not of understanding through observation and interaction of the inherent value anything humans do but instead produced a mindset that compared the conquering "civilized, rational" peoples to those "uncivilized barbarians" they have occupied.
... consider the title of some college art classes: basic "Art History I+II" that covers egypt, greece, rome, europe after the renaissance, and america after the armory show. Anything else that happened anywhere else at any point in history doesn't matter and gets put in the category "Non-western art."
But the point whenever someone brings up Edward Said is that up until a generation or two ago any study in any field that even bothered to examine cultures external to their own did so in what amounts to "Our values versus their inability to yet reach a level of sophistication that matches our values"
Perhaps another art example: Many are well aware of simple cave paintings in France. Impressive, yes, but works of deeper magnitude and greater age in South Africa are ignored; similarly, pre-Egyptian Saharan peoples left numerous rock-carvings that predate formal Egyptian art yet they are ignored.
Edward Said's ideas are often cited in the study of religion as it can be difficult for outsiders to truly grasp the object of study in the same way that a practitioner might. The early pioneers in the study of religion just over a century ago were the first to grasp religion could be an object of study but all too clearly display in their writings the bias of a true believer who writes about these curious savages with their peculiar practices that just don't make sense at all when compared with Protestant Christianity.
I digress.
ma'a es salaama.
Isn't the Long Tail theory the idea that you don't need as big percentage of population to support you as before because Internet allows for larger population to be aware of your products? There might only be one person in million who loves your music (and thus even USA would only have around 300 fans), but worldwide it means six million fans (supposing everybody had the same purchasing power) all who know of you thanks to the Internet?
I could see that this system would be largely infeasible for products with large physical dimensions, but for CD's or (even better) totally immaterial goods such as mp3's might well benefit from this sort of thinking.
Now, the question is how do you drum word-of-mouth when none of your fans have ever met each other IRL due to distances..
Chronologically late.
The Sankrt texts that are written on banana leaves in India need to be oiled to prevent them breaking down. Part of the the deal for the caste system was that the Brahmans had to upkeep the texts, unfortunately now they are in a modern society and these text are being lost to decay. The yoga karuna (the instructions of astanga yoga) was "eaten by the ants" according to S.K Patabi Jois.
I don't, but I do know that on one of the digital archaeology mailing lists I'm on, there's been a call-for-papers for research into an OCR implementation that can handle cuneiform and other ancient writing systems.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Translations are not new works, which is why copyright notices in books specifically state that translations are not permitted. They're covered by the original copyright.
Digitizations are an interesting problem. Photographs of a person, a landscape, or something similar, is a creative work. The conditions can never be reproduced exactly and never occurred before, and thus the work is of something new.
A digitized rendering of something, however, is an exact (as near as makes no odds, if done right) duplicate. A second digitization will be indistinguishable from a copy made of the first digitization. There is therefore no identifiable, unique, moment of creation. If there's no moment of creation, there is little need for a creator. (Apologies to Stephen Hawking for paraphrasing him here.)
Most digital collections can be covered by copyright as databases, as indeed can any structured, organized set of data. This data, as it stands, is not obviously structured. The geographic attribute is assigned by the donor, so what was there for this library to organize?
No doubt someone who is a lawyer in this field can answer that particular question, but I just can't see anything that is obviously new, unique, non-obvious and provided by the collection that is not otherwise present.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
What's wrong with copyright for something like this?
I work for a (sort-of) museum, and it has lots of images like this -- pictures of objects in the collection. A lot of time and money is spent making these images, and some money is made by selling them (e.g. in a book, or licensing the photographs for use by other people). If there was no copyright it would be more difficult for us to pay for making the images.
However, that doesn't mean the photographs need to be copyrighted for 70 years or more.
There is a Swedish company that has done this in Sweden. Their user side technology is based on a really horrible Flash interface, but most public collections of rare manuscripts are available online. I talked with one of their representatives about a year ago and, if I don't remember incorrect, there were about 900 manuscripts already published at different Swedish museum sites and even more in the process of being photographed.
Sweden pillaged Northern and Middle Europe for more then a thousand year (and those parts of Europe pillaged southern Europe and their pillage ended up as our pillage), no other nation ever got much of a chance to pillage Sweden and now our museums have a lot more European manuscripts then the rest of Europe all together, from about any culture that has been writing things down in Europe. The selection is kind of random as the Swedish armies/vikings/pirates preferred books with a lot of gold and jewels (usually removed when the books reached Sweden) or parchment books that could be made into blank books to be used for military book keeping and didn't look much at the actual content. Although there where sometimes standing orders from Swedish scholars what to take and from the Thirty Years' War and forward there where always a large group of scholar expert pillagers accompanying the Swedish army.
Not quite. For journalistic or fine art purposes, you are correct, but if you want to use that picture for advertising, you would need a model release signed by the model, in that case Bill Gates.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
East Asian texts tend to be preserved in their respective languages as well, rather than in translations into English and other foreign languages. CBETA (Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association), for example, is a freely-available massive collection of over 4400 Buddhist texts in their entirety, many of which are 1500+ year old translations from Sanskrit. Some of these texts are quite massive as well, encyclopedic in scope with thousands of pages. Only a very tiny fraction of these has ever been translated into English, but they are all freely available in Chinese.
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
Really, copyrighting of ancient texts is nothing new. The thing is that you don't generally find an ancient text all nicely wrapped up, clear and legible in one place. Generally, you find bits and pieces of it scattered all over the place, and have to piece it together from many contradictory sources. Hence, scholars develop what are called "critical editions"--editions of ancient texts where scholars or teams of scholars have put tremendous amounts of effort into making a best effort at reconstructing the original text. Seriously, in some cases even deciphering the hand-writing can be difficult.
The best example is the New Testament, where there are literally tens of thousands of manuscripts and fragments of manuscripts dating from the first few centuries. For the most part, they agree, however there are some significant differences. (For a really egregious example, take a look at Mark 16.9ff. in a modern translation, and read the footnotes. Good place to look would be the NET, available online at bible.org). It takes a non-trivial amount of effort to sort through these thousands of manuscripts and variations and decide which one is the "original".
Another good example would be my copy of the works of Origen, a second-third century Christian scholar. Origen fell out of favor in the late third and fourth centuries and a lot of his works were lost. So, his works have not survived in one piece. My edition of Origen has three columns--Latin fragments, where he was quoted by Latin fathers, Greek fragments, where he was quoted by Greek fathers, and an English translation that tries to put it all together. Note that Origen wrote in Greek, so that the Latin fragments are translations of his words, not his original words.
Now, I personally have some serious reservations whether this sort of work is sufficiently original to merit a copyright. But, thus far, it has been concluded that it is. I suppose the real answer would be, "sometimes it is, and sometimes it ain't. But the only way to test it would be to slap the work up on your website and wait to get sued.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
The number of Hindu and Buddhist texts is vast, and some of the oldest on the planet. I wonder if they will get around to digitising these.
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
Yes, but the bar for such application of creativity is extremely low. Courts don't answer the question of "what is art?"--they simply pose it.
It all comes down to the labor, couched in your country's copyright framework. It is expensive, time-consuming, and requires considerable skill to prepare these digitizations. Whether your country recognizes the natural right of the parties undertaking that effort or whether you have to couch the analysis in an economic incentive rationale, copyright is the mechanism that allows museums some way to cover the costs and continue to provide this service for other works.
It is true that a pretty standard photograph of an item (for example, a scanned page from a book) doesn't grant a powerful or useful copyright--you can't stop others from taking their own photograph. But you can stop others from simply taking your image itself and reproducing or distributing it.
The scope of copyright protection would be extremely narrow for archival preservation like this, but certainly not nonexistent.
If you get a copyright on a scan/photo of a document, wouldn't you get copyright on a print as well?
They're one and the same. Printing copies is called reproduction, and copyright extends to all copies, including the original.
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.
No, it would mean that each copy is a copy of a copyrighted work, the effective date of which is defined by the laws of your country.
If you scanned each copy in an iterative process, then you could secure a copyright in each copy assuming originality and creativity could be established. With mechanical reproduction (or digital copies), you can't satisfy those requirements and therefore can't get a new copyright on each one. But consider a sculpture. If you recreate the originals one at a time, by hand, without the use of a complete mold, each sculpture will have its own copyright.
Again, the scope will be narrow and probably extend no further than literal or near-literal copying, but still a copyright. Not all copyrights are created equal.
Copyright seems to have an indefinite life these days...
True, but this isn't really anything new. A few centuries back, before modern printing presses and before the fiction that copyright is to encourage creators, it was common for rulers to give (more often, sell) exclusive publication rights to a single local copy shop. This was especially important for the major books such as the Bible and Koran. The age of the text didn't matter; the rulers wanted to make sure that 1) only an authorized translation was produced, and 2) the supply was limited so that the hoi polloi couldn't read the texts themselves.
This isn't all that different in principal from what modern "publishers" like those TV companies are trying to do. They want to be the sole supplier of the information, partly so that you'll have to buy their service and watch their ads if you want to see the information. In both cases, the motive has nothing to do with creativity; it's all about control of the information that the masses have access to, and their "right" to collect money for access to the information.
There was a clear example of this back around 1220, which you can read about in various books on the Mongol "invasion" of Europe. Their first expedition was exploratory, and they took along a small military force mostly for protection from the bandits that they knew infested the far West. Those soldiers fought a lot of defensive battles, because the reports that preceded them described a flock of demonic killers who were ravaging the countryside, and local rulers sent troops to attack them. The main reason for this, it seems, was that Genghis (not yet Khan) & buddies also took along a troop of Korean printers. The Koreans had a mobile print shop set up in their wagons, and as they travelled, they printed and sold cheap editions of whatever was popular locally. This was mostly Korans in central Asia, and Bibles further west. This was a direct threat to the western rulers' control over their own populations, which was based in part on control over the local production of religious and other texts. The response was a campaign to paint the Mongols as demonic visitors intent on killing everyone in their path. By then, of course, the real intent was to depose the demonic western rulers (and replace them with a modern, enlightened form of government ;-). They did succeed in establishing a much cheaper printing industry (and religious freedom) in the areas that they conquered. But the eastern printing technology was embargoed in western Europe, and it took several more centuries for it to be developed by Gutenberg et al in the 1400s.
The use of copyright to control access to information is an old story. And from the start, copyright was applied to texts centuries or even millennia old.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.