open...: British Library Encloses the Public Domain

Connotea Imports 2012-07-31

Summary:

"But hang on: these are materials that are in the public domain; public domain means that anyone can do anything with them - including commercial applications. So this condition of "non-commercial purposes" means one thing, and one thing only: although the texts themselves are public domain, the digitised texts are not (otherwise it would be impossible to impose the non-commercial clause). In other words, far from helping to make knowledge freely accessible to all and sundry, the British Library is actually enclosing the knowledge commons that rightfully belongs to humankind as a whole, by claiming a new copyright term for the digitised versions. Call me ungrateful, but that's a gift I can do without."

Link:

http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com/2011/06/british-library-encloses-public-domain.html

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) ยป Connotea Imports

Tags:

ru.no oa.new oa.licensing oa.google oa.pd oa.books oa.digitization oa.libre oa.british_library oa.copyright

Authors:

petersuber

Date tagged:

07/31/2012, 13:26

Date published:

06/24/2011, 23:16