
The British Library Puts Over 1M Images in the Public Domain - benbreen
http://www.openculture.com/2015/09/the-british-library-puts-over-1000000-images-in-the-public-domain-a-deeper-dive-into-the-collection.html
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scholia
Interesting... but the million images were released in December 2013.

[http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-
scholarship/2013...](http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-
scholarship/2013/12/a-million-first-steps.html)

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devindotcom
Maybe someone's been counting them this whole time and just got to the end.

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acabal
To be clear, the images are _already_ in the public domain; that is, they are
not restricted by copyright. The British Library has, however, made accessible
these public domain images via a web interface.

Their status as images belonging to the public is not related to their being
made accessible by the British Library.

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legulere
Note that at least in some countries just scanning may be considered enough
work that the scanned version is again under copyright.

See the questionable German Projekt Gutenberg:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projekt_Gutenberg-
DE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projekt_Gutenberg-DE)

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pbhjpbhj
The wikipedia article is a bit thin on details - for example are they claiming
their compilation is a new copyright (it most likely is) or are they claiming
their individual scans of historic works each are copyright to them?

Is there a proper English language discussion of any court case in which this
has been tested for this particular claim?

For reference this [http://www.jcms-
journal.com/articles/10.5334/jcms.1021217/](http://www.jcms-
journal.com/articles/10.5334/jcms.1021217/) is quite a good review of the NPG
vs Coetzee non-case [English law] and the Bridgeman vs Corel case [USA law].

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dvliman
in case if anyone interested in the mechanical curator bot source code:
[https://github.com/BL-Labs/embellishments](https://github.com/BL-
Labs/embellishments)

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mkesper
There's also an RSS feed of findings:
[http://mechanicalcurator.tumblr.com/rss](http://mechanicalcurator.tumblr.com/rss)

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colinramsay
Related: does anyone know the "best practise" around digitising photos and
images? What file format is used? What scanning equipment? What's the standard
resolution/DPI used?

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breakall
Not sure I can advise on the best practice, but I know how NOT to do it: my
buddy just told me that a family member spent untold hours digitizing decades
of family photos and documents... all at a resolution of 1024x768. _headdesk_

