Now imagine all of the projects that don’t happen and you will never see because things like this don’t present a prudent or favourable angle to be reused by a modern artist.

Thus are we divorced from our own heritage in all but the most meaningless and trivial ways.

I think the clearest case on this was from New York where an art gallery tried to enforce copyright on the photos of its paintings in its catalogue and because those were literally 1:1 copies it didn’t fly.

They just want to be sure that, having spent money doing so, they see a share of any profit made on it.

There’s a difference between charging for a service and claiming ownership. You’re supporting rent-seeking behavior.

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2000.272

The easiest answer to a  © copyright 1671 notice is that all of Issac Newton’s copyrights — by the most conservative measure (ie. applying current law) — would be gone by 1797: 70 years after his death. Even if it hadn’t predated copyright as a thing there’s simply nothing left to assert 300 years later.

I’ll put my hands up and say that I’m very much ok with Cambridge digitising and republishing Issac Newton’s university notebooks under a creative commons licence but the main difference is that BoingBoing isn’t a scanned copy of work that was performed 300 years ago and they’re actually putting their own work under a creative commons licence.

It’s a question of whether there is any originality in the resulting work. If yes, there is copyright protection. If no, not. So someone merely has to ask Trinity whether the digital images are as faithful as possible to the original. It’s going be difficult for them to answer otherwise than “yes”. For clarity, have they taken steps to enhance or repair any of the text or diagrams in the images? If no, then they will find it very difficult to argue that there is any originality in the digitised images, and that they therefore attract copyright.

The other is a private  corporation, performing tasks with private money.

I’d like to live in a world where elite publically funded institutions set the tone and do this.

What is the difference!

to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work

to Remix — to adapt the work

Just not make money on it.. You can’t print/publish the scans and make money off of these.

Otherwise they have a much more restrictive copyright, the original may be in the public domain but the actual scans are the copyright of the person/organization that did the work.

Edit: I realize they are kept “in the cellar” but that doesn’t mean they are forbidden to be looked at by researchers. Just that they are kept from the greasy fingers of the general public.

Cambridge have paid for the upkeep of the library, keeping the conditions suitable that these notebooks lasted 350 years (far beyond their design life), and storing millions of different books for the future, and paying experts to catalogue them and help people find what they need. They then paid for expensive scanning equipment, and are going through and accurately scanning some increadibly fragile paper whilst trying to avoid damiging it any more.

Do you really think they’ll get a significant increase in goodwill from releasing these as public domain, versus the license they have released it in? Will this come anywhere close to the costs incurred? If the income pays for more scans, won’t that lead to more goodwill?

No, the Sun probably won’t be running the image, but other newspapers did - http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/dec/12/isaac-newton-principia-mathematica  Works of scolarship can use it and cite the relevant pages. If they need to reproduce some of the pages rather than link to them, they can apply for terms – and those terms would (I’d hope) be reasonable for scholarly work. If it’s a publisher duplicating Newton’s annotated Principia, to sell worldwide, then yes I think money should be going back to pay for more scans, rather than just going to the publishing company.

If you want more access than the current, generous license allows – then you should pay for it. The “public” now have access to something they didn’t before – most of whom have never  paid tax in the UK (and therefore contributed in some small way to Cambridge’s upkeep).

Cambridge will be funded based on its current accademic output, not its past riches in a library. It’s a university, not a muesum. 

I have a lot of respect for the stance you’ve taken on copyright with your own personal works Cory, but your model doesn’t work for everyone. At the moment it seems rather like you’re being given a gift and complaining that it’s the wrong colour.

Sure, making these completely free would have been nice, but if I had to choose over having access to them today for free under CC NonCommercial vs. them not having been photographed at all, or them being photographed and “completely free” 10 years from now when enough “catalogue subscriptions” have been collected, or them only available via some paid Cambridge Press or some other publisher’s book, I’ll take CC NonCommercial any day.

The older books such as these notebooks need to be treated with care to make sure they’ll last another 350 years, so you can’t just bung it on a photocopier.

If you put in the time to go through their records, find something that is of interest, and arrange to get it scanned in a way that won’t damage it (and pay the experts doing so for their time) then you can talk about the rights it gets released under. If you don’t have the time or money to do so, why should they be doing it for free?

And frankly, embarrassing.  The thinnest of excuses for monetising its collection.  What else do they have?  Are they like the Vatican, holding lots of papers that people have forgotten about?

Universities should promulgate ideas and incentivise creative thinking and endeavour.  Anything they do (or don’t do) that dimishes that subtracts from their contribution to an egalitarian, informed and enriched society.

So I’m annoyed at this, totally.

No one else could digitise Cambridge’s holdings — holdings acquired with public money for the public interest — because they’re in Cambridge’s cellars, where they are being kept in trust for the public.

The problem with the “real world” argument is twofold:

1. It applies regardless of the economic climate: during the boomtime, cultural institutions were told that they could pad their fortunes with fees for access to the public domain; during the downturn, they’re told they must extend their shrinking budget by charging for access to public goods.

2. It is jingo, not evidence (any time someone asserts that their position reflects “the real world,” this is generally the case). The evidence — from the EU, from the US, from the Exchequer — is that the most profitable use of the public domain is to set it free, so that many, many different businesses can be built atop it, providing jobs and tax revenues and keeping costs as low as possible (for the business’s customers).

Finally, as I wrote above, the problem of Cambridge’s contracting fortunes won’t be stopped by this tariff. If Cambridge’s governors are making a bet on the future, the smart money is on providing maximum value to the nation from Cambridge’s riches (winning over public support for its ongoing funding); not on squeezing a few extra groats out of the users of public riches held in trust by Cambridge and hoping that this will offset the cuts that come when the public can’t see the case for supporting an institution that has transformed itself into a mere licensor, rather than a bastion of culture.

If the idea is merely to offset Cambridge’s scanning costs, there are many better and more reliable ways to do this: they could publish a catalogue of available works with estimated scanning costs and take up subscriptions (from the public and industry alike) to digitise these and set them free. This aligns everyone’s incentives very neatly: Cambridge ends up releasing the works best loved by the nation, everyone gets to participate maximally in that public spend, and the way to raise more money isn’t by charging rent on last year’s work, but rather soliciting money for next year’s release.

After all, the most likely commercial users of these images aren’t newspapers (is the Sun really going to devote an issue to tabloid-sized reproductions of Newton’s long-division practice?) but works of scholarship and textbooks whose principle customers are public institutions. So the public pays to digitise the Newton papers. Then a publisher pays to license these scans. Then a school pays a higher marginal cost to acquire the reproduction so that the publisher can recoup the fee. And in all the interstices: full employment for licensing lawyers, who draw up contracts to paper over the public paying itself for use of its own works.