
Vatican, Oxford put ancient manuscripts online - hawkharris
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/vatican-oxford-put-ancient-manuscripts-online-1.2450370
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sentenza
Non-commercial license. What a shame.

In parts of the European Union, the CC-NC provision essentially amounts to a
complete uselessness of the document, because of the weird definitions of the
word "commercial".

For instance, here in Germany, if you have a blog, no advertisements, make no
money out of it, but you have thousands of followers, you are acting in
"commercial scope" (ie. you are too successful to be non-commercial), thus
inviting all the nastyness of being sued for commercial copyright
infringement.

The only thing I can do with a CC-NC document without legal risk is to look at
it.

The sad thing is, that now nobody will bother to scan these documents and put
them online under a different license, since "they are already out there for
free!!".

It is quite likely that nobody involved with the project knew this, which goes
to show how dangerous the NC-provision is.

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femto
Perhaps the claimed copyright is groundless, on the basis the the scanned
documents are well into the public domain [1]? Presumably the libraries are
striving for faithful reproduction, which would imply no creative step, and a
number of jurisdictions don't recognise "sweat of the brow" as being reason
enough for copyright[2].

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyfraud](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyfraud)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow)

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rmc
_a number of jurisdictions don 't recognise "sweat of the brow"_

A number of juristicions _do_ though. Including (maybe) the UK.

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xerophtye
I am not a christian, but IMO this is a pretty cool effort. More such ancient
manuscripts should be made available online. These are important artifacts and
should be made available to the general public, without requiring them to
travel to a specific Museum.

Personally, I am interested in Da Vinci's Codex Atlanticus. Is that available
yet?

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xerophtye
Well instead of flagging my comment, I think it would be more constructive if
you present your opinion and engage in discussion.

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DanBC
Try to ignore single downvotes (these are not flags).

The buttons are small and people often hit the wrong one. Especially on
mobile.

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soneca
exactly. I have accidentally downvoted more than one pg comments, for example.

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mkesper
Wow, now we know how how those withered, barely readable tomes in your RPG
should look like:
[http://bav.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/icv/page.php?book=ms._barocci_2...](http://bav.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/icv/page.php?book=ms._barocci_235&page=9)

