
British Library has released over a million images onto Flickr Commons - mds
http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/2013/12/a-million-first-steps.html
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gabemart
This is fantastic, but I do have one small quibble.

    
    
        > These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books
        > digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images into
        > the Public Domain.
        

The images were already in the public domain. Merely scanning a public-domain
image is not a sufficiently transformative process to create a new work
protected by copyright.

However, Microsoft was under no obligation to share the scanned images
publicly, and it was generous of them to do so. But this is different to
dedicating a work protected by copyright to tbe public domain, e.g. using the
CC0 dedication [0]. To gift a work to the public domain, you must first hold
the copyright of that work.

The distinction may seem pedantic to some, but it seems important to me.

[0]
[https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/](https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)

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ig1
You seem to be mistaken in assuming that US copyright law (or more precisely
the decision set down in Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp.) somehow applies
to the world and not just the US.

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Dylan16807
Are you declaring that there are copyright doctrines more restrictive than the
US? I'm very interested in hearing specifics!

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jval
Lots of copyright doctrines are more restrictive than the US. Most notably, a
lot of jurisdictions don't have a concept of fair use nearly as broad as the
US concept.

Also, the US uses trade treaties to cajole other countries into adopting very
restrictive copyright doctrines. It's more common than you'd think.

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nl
The lack of fair use is a problem in non-US jurisdictions.

 _However_ , I'm not aware of anywhere where copyright lasts longer than the
US (except in special cases like Peter Pan[1], even if that is really just
perpetual rights to royalties from performance[2]).

Edit: Just noticed that [2] says copyright in Mexico is actually longer than
in the US, but I'm not aware of the specifics of how it works.

[1]
[http://www.jmbarrie.co.uk/copyright/](http://www.jmbarrie.co.uk/copyright/)

[2]
[http://www.gosh.org/gen/peterpan/copyright/faq/#Copyright](http://www.gosh.org/gen/peterpan/copyright/faq/#Copyright)

~~~
masklinn
Honduras has life + 75 years. Also some countries provide circumstantial
extensions e.g. France's copyright is life + 70, but if the author is "Mort
pour la France" (died for France, which is usually applied to service members
but may also apply to civilians) it's life + 80.

~~~
rmc
France also added a few years here and there. For example the period in WW2
when France was occupied by Nazi Germany doesn't count for copyright.

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masklinn
A few countries did that, but those extensions were mostly predicated on a 50
years copyright (the "morts pour la france" extension also is, it's 30 years
tacked onto the original 50). When copyright got normalised to 70 by EU rules
(or separately extended before EU or EU entry), these extensions became moot
in EU countries. IIRC Russia is the only country where war copyright
extensions still apply, as a 4 years extension was specifically added when
they rewrote their copyright laws in 1993.

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sheff
For any HN'ers based in London the British Library in St Pancras is a
fantastic resource, and their Business and IP Centre (
[http://www.bl.uk/bipc/](http://www.bl.uk/bipc/) ) has an easy signup for a
Readers Pass for entrepreneurs.

~~~
AlexMuir
I tried getting some work done there a couple of years ago. All the desks were
taken and the internet was a nightmare to get onto and highly restricted.
Things may have changed since then. I tried going into the Business centre but
lacked the required ID.

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wavefunction
It's a Library rather than a Starbucks, innit?

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waqf
You're saying that it's okay that the British Library doesn't have adequate
infrastructure to support people trying to work and access information?

The equivalent would be if Starbucks, the coffee shop, only served inferior
quality coffee at a ridiculously high price … wait a minute …

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grey-area
It's not really that kind of library, it's a central store for valuable (or
just old) physical objects. They didn't even previously give out membership
unless you had a request for a specific title that they hold which wasn't
available elsewhere. Accessing all information is not their central purpose,
accessing specific information on paper is.

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yapcguy
Great, but why should the British Library, a non-profit charity and UK
taxpayer assisted institution put these images on the servers of a US based
for-profit company?

There are a lot of talented Brits in the Bay Area, but there are also many
great UK based programmers and companies in the UK who could have developed a
home-grown solution. This is embarrassing on many levels.

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smtddr
I'm of the mindset that developing a home-grown/in-house solution when there
are time-tested & proven solutions out there is generally a mistake unless
you're trying to innovate and offer it to the public. I worked at a place
where the devs thought apache2, django, rails, etc. were too slow so they made
their own web-server re-implementing the whole HTTP 1.1 protocol from
scratch....

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7952
A UK government agency tried to release wartime aerial photos for free on the
web and it was a disaster because the site was always overwhelmed with
traffic. Now you can only get those photos by paying. This story could easily
get picked up by a large news organisation and it needs to be hosted on
something with lots of capacity.

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ArekDymalski
This is a great initiative but as long as these images aren't reasonably
tagged they'll remain undiscovered.

~~~
mongol
Yes but they have a strategy to address that:

> We plan to launch a crowdsourcing application at the beginning of next year,
> to help describe what the images portray. Our intention is to use this data
> to train automated classifiers that will run against the whole of the
> content. The data from this will be as openly licensed as is sensible (given
> the nature of crowdsourcing) and the code, as always, will be under an open
> licence.

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andrevan
Suggestion: 3D scan and release as open source 3d models of everything in the
British Museum as well.

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AsGw
This is wonderful. 17th/18th/19th century images notwithstanding, some of
these are quite beautiful.

It's good that they put it up on the internet, apart from just the exposure
(someone sitting half a world away seeing them), but also they could be used
by someone now.

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leke
How do you filter a search in flickr to only search this library?

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rsiqueira
I'm also trying to do a search in this library and had no success. Not even
using Google image search. The collection is useless if one can not search for
images inside. It's not pratical to browse through millions of images to find
one. If there is any way to search for keywords in the collection please tell
me.

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plicense
How big is the entire collection?

