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Ancient Public Domain
Posted by Steven Wu on Thursday, March 04 @ 00:47:20 EST
The New York Times has a story on high-tech gizmos scanning ancient texts from a low-tech monastery.
[H]ere at St. Catherine's, in the world's oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastic community, a Greek Orthodox monk from Texas is working with some of the world's highest-resolution digital technology to help preserve the monastery's 3,300 priceless and impressively intact ancient manuscripts. . . .

As interest in access to the texts has grown, so has the impetus to take new measures to document and preserve them. Making digital copies for public use will help prevent regular handling of the originals while also providing insurance in case the originals are damaged or lost. . . .

The ultimate goal of St. Catherine's digitization project is to photograph all 1.8 million pages in the monastery's manuscript collection.

This is pretty cool. I also think it's fair to say that these texts will be safe from any copyright term extension acts.
 
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Re: Ancient Public Domain (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Thursday, March 04 @ 16:11:28 EST
Without commenting on this particular situation, sometimes when a new technology is used to preserve an ancient work (the Dead Sea Scrolls come to mind), while the underlying text would be public domain, the digitized version may itself rise to being a derivative work. Furthermore, the digitized work might itself be disseminated only under a license which could in theory prohibit unfettered distribution. My only point is is that you can't make assumptions that digitization efforts will result in 'open' works.


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Re: Ancient Public Domain (Score: 1)
by StanfordLaw on Friday, March 05 @ 10:16:24 EST
(User Info | Send a Message) http://fladenexp.blogspot.com
Interesting.


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Don't count on it (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Saturday, March 06 @ 15:20:01 EST
I could easily see companies petitioning for a "restoration copyright". See the Eldred decision (maybe the CTEA was meant to encourage the restoration and distribution of decaying works) or the "worst EULA ever" discussion a month back.


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