[open-humanities] The First Folio
James Cummings
James.Cummings at it.ox.ac.uk
Sat Apr 26 07:55:56 UTC 2014
Hi all,
The project manager (and person whose idea the project and
crowdfunding that allowed the conservation and imaging to take
place) is Pip Willcox. I know she pushed for as open a license as
possible and assume that meant a decision in the Bodleian Digital
Library Systems and Services (BDLSS) or higher in the
organisation -- who made that final decision I'm personally not
sure. I can ask if you want.
Off to Cambridge for a project meeting all weekend,
-James
On 25/04/14 23:02, todd.d.robbins at gmail.com wrote:
> I second Rufus' comment and have learned a lot more about the
> state of licensing there at Oxford. James, what committee/persons
> made the licensing decision that now stands?
>
> Cheers!
>
>
> On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 3:07 AM, Rufus Pollock
> <rufus.pollock at okfn.org <mailto:rufus.pollock at okfn.org>> wrote:
>
> Just wanted to say that this has been a great thread and
> James comments here were fantastic in explicating a set of
> complex social and legal issues - thanks James!
>
> Rufus
>
>
> On 24 April 2014 17:44, James Cummings
> <James.Cummings at it.ox.ac.uk
> <mailto:James.Cummings at it.ox.ac.uk>> wrote:
>
> On 24/04/14 16:25, Seth Woodworth wrote:
>
> Let me begin by thanking Bodleian for releasing this
> resource
> online, and for creating this wonderful TEI edition.
>
>
> Hi Seth,
>
> Let me be clear that I do not speak for the project,
> nothing below is legal advice, and I am not a lawyer. I
> merely provided the project with TEI encoding advice and
> a few bits of XSLT to help further enrich, correct, or
> enable some planned searching of the data.
>
> Thank you doubly for licensing this work under a license
> compatible with free cultural works (unlike the current
> quartos.org <http://quartos.org> <http://quartos.org>).
>
>
> There were some common members of both projects. I
> believe that the quartos.org <http://quartos.org> XML
> files have a non-commercial (CC+By+NC) restriction on
> them and the images might be even more restricted. I
> would be tempted to think this was an artifact of a
> multi-national multi-institutional project. I do not work
> for the Bodleian (but University of Oxford's IT
> Services), but believe that the Bodleian has been
> increasingly working towards an open-by-default policy in
> their digital materials.
>
>
> I will, of course, cite your organization as
> requested in any
> projects where I might use your works.
> But, I believe you are mistaken in your licensing on
> the scans.
>
>
> I understand that you believe there was no new work in
> photographing the the Bodleian First Folio. The work was
> unbound, conserved, and photographed, all of which are
> quite skilled stages in conservation, curation, and
> preservation. They were photographed in raw then
> converted to tiff then even lower-res but still quite
> high jpg that you can download fully from the site). I
> would be unsurprised if the Bodleian wanted to argue that
> these are not mere scans but high quality photographs
> with a lot of work and thought put into them.
>
> In the UK and US there is a doctrine that states that
> there is no
> sweat-of-brow copyright.
> Transcribing the work into a new format (.jpg) does
> not grant a
> fresh copyright on the work.
> Ownership of copyright is a prerequisite to licensing
> it to third
> parties, under a CC license or otherwise.
> Wikipedia has a policy about scans of PD works
> <http://commons.wikimedia.org/__wiki/Commons:When_to_use_the___PD-Art_tag
> <http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:When_to_use_the_PD-Art_tag>>,
> that may be relevant.
>
>
> This may confuse the intellectual property right of the
> text (FF is pre-copyright) with that of the digital
> images. I do not believe that any new copyright in the
> First Folio has been created, or indeed ever existed, but
> digital images of out of copyright works _do_ attract
> IPR. If I stood outside the Bodleian building and took a
> photo of the building, you would not argue (I suspect)
> that I did not have copyright over my digital image. I
> chose how to frame it, what time of day to take it,
> whether to have someone cycling by with an Oxford gown
> on, and indeed how to post-process it to make it look
> sunny. Likewise if I was in front of a different object
> that happens to be a book and took a photograph of that,
> then I should still have copyright in that photograph.
> (Presuming I didn't sign away this right by conditions of
> access or something, c.f. British Museum.) I haven't
> changed the copyright of the original. You are right,
> however, that it is possible to argue that the First
> Folio (as a pre-copyright work) should not be able to be
> subject to a creative commons license because no one owns
> the copyright in it. This is not true, many would argue,
> of the carefully crafted digital images of the conserved
> object. I suspect that if resource holding institutions
> were told that they had to openly release any image they
> took of an out of copyright work as public domain it
> would be disastrous for the future of (and future
> research on) our cultural heritage objects. They'd just
> stop taking the images (or make it so costly as to be
> prohibitive). At least these images are available for
> download under a really quite permissive license.
>
> I do happen to know that, because the project to create
> the images was crowd-funded by the public, the desire is
> and was always to have the images available with the
> fewest restrictions possible for the public. I believe
> those involved with the project went out of their way to
> ensure a not more-restrictive (e.g. +NC) license was
> applied. That the Bodleian is moving in the direction of
> releasing more of its digital materials under open
> licenses is a good thing, IMHO. And has come a long way
> compared to a decade ago (compare the restrictions on
> http://image.ox.ac.uk/show?__collection=balliol&manuscript=__ms238a
> <http://image.ox.ac.uk/show?collection=balliol&manuscript=ms238a>
> for example). It is better than the alternative (because
> the only real alternative is more restrictive, it will be
> a while, I suspect, before CC0 and/or public domain is a
> default with resource-holding institutions). Only time
> will tell.
>
>
> I am unclear if a TEI document is a new creative
> work, or a
> faithful conversion into a new format, implying it isn't
> copyrightable either.
>
>
> A TEI XML marked up work is almost *definitely* a new
> creative work. The encoding or annotation of texts is
> almost always an intellectual activity in itself given
> the amount of interpretation and choice of encoding that
> digital editors have. To suggest that such encoding could
> ever be an uncontested 'faithful conversion' shows that I
> should be pointing you to the TEI Guidelines to see the
> vast array of choices and possibilities for
> interpretation that exist:
> http://www.tei-c.org/release/__doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/
> <http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-doc/en/html/>
> (All TEI Consortium materials are dual-licensed CC+by
> and BSD 2-clause if you are interested.)
>
>
> But I would be very curious to hear people's
> positions on the matter.
>
>
> While I dislike cultural resource holding institutions of
> any kind imposing limitations on access to their digital
> materials, CC+By is an open enough license for me.
>
>
> Again, your licensing terms are 100% agreeable to me,
> and I will
> respect your wishes for attribution regardless.
>
>
> Again, not mine, but the Bodleian's and I believe they
> were the best the project could get within current
> policy. In the end it is better to have them available
> than not available, and citation is a very low barrier to
> use. I'm sure that feedback would be appreciated to
> shakespeare at bodleian.ox.ac.uk
> <mailto:shakespeare at bodleian.ox.ac.uk>.
>
> Again, I'm only tangentially involved in the project, do
> not speak for them or the Bodleian library, and have no
> legal basis for any of my personal comment or musings
> above. ;-)
>
> -James
>
>
> --
> Dr James Cummings, James.Cummings at it.ox.ac.uk
> <mailto:James.Cummings at it.ox.ac.uk>
> Academic IT Services, University of Oxford
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>
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> --
> Tod Robbins
> Digital Asset Manager, MLIS
> todrobbins.com <http://todrobbins.com/> | @todrobbins
> <http://www.twitter.com/#!/todrobbins>
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--
Dr James Cummings, James.Cummings at it.ox.ac.uk
Academic IT Services, University of Oxford
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