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cc-licenses - Re: Licensing of old out-of-copyright facsimiles?

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Rob Myers <robmyers AT mac.com>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: Licensing of old out-of-copyright facsimiles?
  • Date: Mon, 13 Dec 2004 21:25:20 +0000

On 13 Dec 2004, at 19:33, Mike Linksvayer wrote:

Erik Sandberg wrote:
I am doing some noncommercial work on typesetting old music, based on facsimiles
of out-of-copyright notes (see www.mutopiaproject.org). Right now, I am in
contact with a library which has a collection of handwritten scores from the
18th century.
[...]
Now I am also interested in sharing these facsimiles over Internet, so that
other people can help me by proofreading my score. Now the library refuses to
release their facsimiles as Public Domain

Does the library really get to claim copyright on photocopies (I'm assuming that's what "fascimiles" means) of public domain material?

IANAL,
Mike

IANAL either.

I think the library get to impose whatever Ts&Cs they want on your access to public domain materials that they are providing, like the online legal document services do.

The original poster can't CC license the raw notes of the score, because CC licenses are copyright licenses and so don't work on public domain material.

In the UK (and probably the rest of Europe, I don't know about the US) they could claim copyright on the typographic presentation of the score if it was novel enough. And they could certainly claim copyright on the computer markup code for the typography (the TeX or whatever) and CC that.

- Rob.





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