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

[jd]

Most of the publishers' nations are also extinct. Lawyers, though, I can't vouch for. Demons have very long lifespans.

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

[jd]

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.

Re:Sounds about right

[Jane Q. Public]

Not entirely true. In the U.S. at any rate, if you take a picture of Bill Gates walking down the street, in full view of the public, he has no right to your picture. Anything in public, for that matter, is fair game. And you can sell, or license, or do whatever the hell you want with it.

Re:Sounds about right

[xaxa]

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.

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.

Re:Sounds about right

[Hognoxious]

A digitized rendering of something, however, is an exact (as near as makes no odds, if done right) duplicate.

But doing it right isn't trivial.

Re:Sounds about right

[corsec67]

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.

Re:Sounds about right

[Keith_Beef]

Copyright on things like the Mona Lisa, or Eiffel Tower are "perpetually" held, even though they were created and "discovered" during "modern" copyright terms.

Not quite true.

In French law, which applies to the Eiffel Tower, the architect of a building owns the rights to the commercial reproduction of images of that building for a set period of time (being 70 years after the death of the architect IIRR).

The case of the Eiffel Tower is particularly illuminating, in that the tower can be photographed during the day and that the image can be used for commercial purposes, yet a similar photograph taken at night may not be used so freely...

The problem is that the lights on the tower are protected by the same laws as the tower itself.

This question is posed quite frequently in French photography magazines (e.g. Chasseur d'Images) and there are plenty of references on the web. Below is an very good article. http://www.journaldunet.com/ebusiness/temoignage/temoignage/24557/ai-je-le-droit-d-utiliser-l-image-d-un-batiment-public-tel-que-la-tour-eiffel-par-exemple-pour-l-integrer-dans-le-graphisme-d-un-site-internet/

K.

Re:Sounds about right

[jc42]

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.

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

[Petrushka]

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?

Pretty much the entire content of the site appears to consist of photographs (or facsimiles, if you prefer; I don't know the details of how the images were copied). Somehow I doubt the photographs were taken 8000 years ago.

If you were to transcribe the text of The Precious Book on Noteworthy Dates by Husayn bin Zayd bin 'Ali al-Jahhaf, written in the 10th century, you won't be infringing anyone's copyright. However, if you reproduce the images ... beware.

Re:Copyright

[CowboyBob500]

I honestly can't believe that anyone actually thinks that the copyright is on the content of the items. It's pretty obvious that the copyright is on the photographs taken of the items.

Re:Copyright

[jd]

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.

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:Copyright

[johannesg]

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?

Of course not. How will the poor authors ever be stimulated to write something ever again if they cannot reap the rewards of their hard labour? Really, won't someone think of the mummy's?

Incidentally, I'm wondering if there is anyone on the planet who is not directly descended from the people who wrote this 8000 years ago. I think I'd like to claim my share of the incoming generated by this now please!

Re:Copyright

[mike2R]

I'm wondering if that part of the summary is just a troll. "Astonishingly, the collection is covered by numerous copyright laws, according to the legal page" says the summary. Looking at the only legal page I can find: http://www.wdl.org/en/legal.html it says:

About Copyright and the Collections

Content found on the WDL Web site is contributed by WDL partners. Copyright questions about partner content should be directed to that partner. When publishing or otherwise distributing materials found in a WDL partner's collections, the researcher has the obligation to determine and satisfy domestic and international copyright law or other use restrictions.

You can find out more information about copyright law in the World Intellectual Property Organization's member states at http://www.wipo.int/about-ip/en/.

Maybe I've missed another page or something, but that just seems like a standard bit of CYA, not an attempt to extend copyrights by millennia.

Re:Copyright

[pbhj]

[Amended for scope:] The copyright laws of other countries do not apply in any particular country.

An international treaty is always {{fact}} ratified into law in the host country. Laws of other countries may be upheld by a law drafted in the host country but it is the host countries law that is enforcing it.

If someone can contradict this with evidence I'd be fascinated.

The only example I think might exist would be a religious law?

The USA ratified the Berne Convention in 1980-ish IIRC.

Re:Copyright

[Elky Elk]

Exactly. The low number of works produced by dead people is a direct consequence of poorer copyright protections compared to the living.

Re:Copyright

[mr_matticus]

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.

Go

[Evelas]

Did anyone else see "Ancient Books Go..." and think they'd discovered some ancient Go books?

The rise of social consciousness

[mcrbids]

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!

Re:The rise of social consciousness

[antic]

The tip of the tail will change and data (rare songs or live recordings) will slip off the available net unless a couple of organisations start cataloguing every single piece of such information.

Sometime in the distant future...

[Anachragnome]

Gravestone uncovered by excavations for the new Pan-Continental Bicycle Suspension Bridge Project...

"Here Lies Alfred E. Neuman
Mad as Hell...
Born 1954, Died 2337
Copyright, 1954"

no big deal

[belmolis]

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.

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:Was the racist overtone intended???

[Hierarch]

Wait, what racist overtone? Just about anyone who's actually on the lookout for older manuscripts knows that there's not a lot of middle eastern content available. It's just a fact. An unfortunate one, to be sure, for historians, but there's no racism. You're being oversensitive.

Europe, on the other hand, has a great deal of published archaeological research. For example, if I want to research medieval knives, I can find a wealth of information on English artifacts. When I tried to find references on Armenian specimens, the only thing I could find was a 3-volume Russian dig report. The situation is endlessly frustrating.

Re:Was the racist overtone intended???

[ptudor]

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.

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" ... 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."

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.

Re:Was the racist overtone intended???

[jd]

You are correct. There's no shortage of Middle Eastern material already on the Internet ETCSL, Library of Congress, CDLI all have collections of cuneiform documents from Sumeria, Akkadia and Babylonia. It would have been child's play to collect all of that and add it to the collection.

They might well do so, in future. The standings in the league table are merely the starting point. But, yes, because of who is doing the starting, it IS no surprise that American and British researchers would concentrate on texts closer to home, particularly as there's going to be a national incentive to prioritize home-grown stuff above museum pieces. Especially if *cough* some of the museums would rather not remind people of what they have.

On the other hand, Middle Eastern countries don't have quite the same fascination with massively ancient cultures, many simply don't have the money or the resources (Iraq being a good example), and even when they DO have these, more than a few of the really early writings from the region are, ummm, elsewhere.

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.

One set of texts in deep need of help

[F34nor]

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.

Re:One set of texts in deep need of help

[clarkkent09]

An interesting question is whether they will survive as long in the digital format as they did in banana leaf format. They might not be eaten by ants, but they can easily disappear in failing hard drives, formats that nobody can read anymore, accidental deletes or perhaps just buried under the mountains and mountains of information with little hope of ever being found again. The primary job of historians 1000 years from now might well be deciphering long forgotten file formats from dusty libraries of ancient hard drives, CDs etc.

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"?

Re:Was the racist overtone intended???

[pmarini]

Simply that the Library in Alexandria burned down at some point (as we all know that "civilisation" began in Mesopotamia) so the number in Middle East would be mch bigger.
I am surprised that there are 2 items for North America dating to pre-1500, and digging a little they are works describing Columbus discovery as-it-happens!
Funny thing is that there are a total of 4 items relating to the subject of Columbus and while two of them are "located" to the place of publication, those two are "located" to NA, but with the descriptive text indicating

It most likely was produced in Basel, Switzerland[...]

and

The first edition of the letter was printed in Spanish, in Barcelona, in April 1493. Within a month, Stephan Plannck published a Latin translation in Rome.

I wouldn't call myself a librarian if I did this kind of mistakes...

Excellent!

[krou]

I hear Gozer was very big in Sumeria. Hopefully there's something in these texts to suggest what he's doing in my icebox.

Sweden has allready done this

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

English

[hey]

Quite a few in English...
http://www.wdl.org/en/search/gallery?ql=eng&l=English

Re:Was the racist overtone intended???

[plasticsquirrel]

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.

Nice collection, and with pdf download as well

[lucag]

There are already several project to scan and/or make available ancient texts [see, for example,
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ or http://www.archive.org/ , not to say of the more specialist sites like http://www.etana.org/ (for ancient near-east history) or the impressive Posner Collection at
http://posner.library.cmu.edu/Posner/ ]
However, most of these (with the remarkable exception of gallica and cmu)
  mostly present late XIX
early XX century editions of the texts. This is good, but I feel it is definitely interesting to get also some "primary texts" online, which is what this project is doing [I don't quite like that la "Description de l'Egypte" is under 8000 BC- 499 AD, rather than 1800 AD - 1849 AD: the books are ABOUT Egyptian Antiquities, yet they were written after the Napoleonic expedition!]

I was going to complain about the need to use wget to get the books to browse off line, yet I have just seen that there actually is an option to download the texts as pdf files (alas not djvu); this is really a nice surprise; actually, I was expecting the donating libraries to try their utmost to prevent this [not that it would ever works]

I would say that this is really a worthy project.

P.S.
  There is a small editorial here as well, but I don't know if it requires subscription to be read:

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090420/full/news.2009.377.html

Copyright on Ancient texts is nothing new

[Fished]

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.

Hindu and Buddhist texts

[Eravnrekaree]

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.