LL-L "Technica" 2009.03.07 (01) [E]

Sat Mar 7 20:16:20 UTC 2009

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L O W L A N D S - L - 07 March 2009 - Volume 01
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From: Heiko Evermann <heiko.evermann at gmx.de>
Subject: LL-L "Technica" 2009.03.06 (04) [E]

Dear Roger

> Many of us may have resources that date from the beginning of last century
> or before.
>
> These publications may be yellowing and becoming brittle.

...

> We could scan those publications before brittleness turns them completely
> into power.

That is a good idea. I have prepared several books for
pgdp.net/gutenberg.org. Some were already scanned by google books,
others I have scanned myself.

>
> So I have a couple of questions.
> 1 - What about legal rights?
>
> - Can we scan, and publish on the web, an original print, after the author
> is dead for at least 70 years?

If you pass it through pgdp.net, only the USA rules are important.
This means that everything before 1923 can be uses, independent from
the death date of the author.

> - Do we have some rights on the scan (since we did it and the scanned
> original copy is our property)?

That depends from where you live. In Germany you don't, in the USA you
might. Gutenberg only "harvests" websites like google.org when there
is a general agreement with the scan provider.

>   E.g. I would state that my scans are my property and may not be
published
> elswhere,
>   so that I can withdraw it all from my web pages in case a legal issue
> raises.

If the user is in Germany you might not be able to enforce that. But
if there are legal problems it might not be yours in that case.

> - What when cannot find the relevant data of the author, or in cases of an
> anthology?

Then you are in trouble, at least as far as gutenberg.org is concerned.

> - What in case of an original publishing house that still exists, the
author
> being dead though for more then 70 years?

Again: gutenberg.org is satisfied if the book is published before 1923
(or was it 1922?). After that the USA uses a different time span so
that books printed after 1923 will proably not be used by
gutenberg.org

>
> 2 - Technical stuff.
>
> I would scan pages at 300 dpi; paste the saved jpg files in a word doc and
> safe finally in pdf format, for getting an acceptable resolution.
>
> However the size of the pdf file can blow up and force me to split an
> several parts.

PDF based on scans is not very useful. Better have them passed through
pgdp.net so that the text gets extraced and corrected.

> I see in France for old books they often leave things as one jpg file for
> each page,
> forcing to download page by page.

Who does that? Gutenberg? Not to my knowledge.

> Further I have read somewhere that in the Gutenberg cercles they prefer
> character recognition being applied and the content being saved in txt
> files.

pgdp.net is the main provider for gutenberg.org's e-books. Go to
pgdp.net, there is a whole bunch of friendly people who can help you.
You would even find people who OCR your scans and do all the rest. We
are always happy when we get good scans.

> This may give problems for representing some sounds represented by exotic
> characters (I once had a problem with rspresenting "u-ring' in an old
> Limburgish text, since it doesn't exist in html)

During proofreading such a letter would be represented as "[.u]" or
whatever one might have to define. In Post Processing one would
convert that to some viable HTML representation. I am sure that there
is a solution, at least one could include that letter as a small
inline image, each time it occurs.

> Further this requires a letter-by-letter check on errors, so one cannot
> publish very fast.

That is exactly what pgdp.net is made for: three rounds of
letter-by-letter checking on errors, two rounds on formatting and a
good post-production round.

>
> Lay-out and titles in the margin are also lost.

They (pgdp.net) will take care of all that. Don't worry.

Hope to see you soon on pgdp.net. If you have any questions, pgdp has
a large number of online formums on things like content providing (how
do I scan, what resolution), proofreading (what do I do with the
exotic stuff in book xxx on page yyy) etc. You will always find
someone who can help you.

Heiko Evermann

----------

From: Marcus Buck <list at marcusbuck.org>
Subject: LL-L "Technica" 2009.03.06 (04) [E]

From: Roger Thijs, Euro-Support, Inc. <roger.thijs at euro-support.be <mailto:
roger.thijs at euro-support.be>>
Subject: LL-L Technica

Many of us may have resources that date from the beginning of last century
or before.

These publications may be yellowing and becoming brittle.

Litterature in lowlands dialects is often a bit kitchy: "my mother
language", "in the shadow of our village tower" etc;, so often of low
literary value (so it will never be scanned by serious libraries), but this
stuff may still be very interesting as witness of a local language/dialect
variant.

We could scan those publications before brittleness turns them completely
into power.

So I have a couple of questions.

1 - What about legal rights?

- Can we scan, and publish on the web, an original print, after the author
is dead for at least 70 years?

- Do we have some rights on the scan (since we did it and the scanned
original copy is our property)?

 E.g. I would state that my scans are my property and may not be published
elswhere,

 so that I can withdraw it all from my web pages in case a legal issue
raises.

- What when cannot find the relevant data of the author, or in cases of an
anthology?

- What in case of an original publishing house that still exists, the author
being dead though for more then 70 years?

If the author is dead for more than 70 years the works are free and you can
do with them whatever you want. Publishing houses have no rights to them.
You have no rights on the scan. Copyright only applies to intellectual work.
Scanning is just a mechanical task. So everybody can take your scans and do
with them whatever he wants. On the other side you can take the scans of
others (for example Google Books) and do with them whatever you want.
Depending on the jurisdiction of your country you may not be allowed to copy
large portions of a database (e.g. copying thousands of books from Google
Books).
Whether the original book is your property does not matter at all if the
author is dead for more than 70 years.
If you cannot find the bibliographic data of the author you have to assume
that his works are not yet free except if its obvious he's dead more than 70
years (e.g. you know the author is born 1830 but you don't know the year of
death: it's highly unlikely that he died age 110 or older, so you are safe
to copy his works).
You can copy a single text from an anthology if the author of the single
text is dead for 70 years. You only can copy the whole anthology if all
authors of all texts and the creator of the anthology are dead for 70 years
(at least if creating the anthology was an act of intellectual work, if not,
you can ignore the creator).

2 - Technical stuff.

I would scan pages at 300 dpi; paste the saved jpg files in a word doc and
safe finally in pdf format, for getting an acceptable resolution.

However the size of the pdf file can blow up and force me to split an
several parts.

The technical standard for scans is DJVu <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DjVu>.
It allows collecting the scans in a single file and has a very efficient
compression method.

I see in France for old books they often leave things as one jpg file for
each page,

forcing to download page by page.

Further I have read somewhere that in the Gutenberg cercles they prefer
character recognition being applied and the content being saved in txt
files.

This may give problems for representing some sounds represented by exotic
characters (I once had a problem with rspresenting "u-ring' in an old
Limburgish text, since it doesn't exist in html)

Further this requires a letter-by-letter check on errors, so one cannot
publish very fast.

Lay-out and titles in the margin are also lost.

I recommend using Wikisource instead of Gutenberg or similar projects.
Wikisource supports all Unicode characters and full layout. But of course
Wikisource too strives for corrected texts and not raw OCRs only. I guess
that's something all digitalization projects want.

Limburgish Wikisource is under <http://li.wikisource.org/> and a Low Saxon
version can be found under <http://www.wikisource.org/wiki/Category:nds>
(not yet a project of its own, but part of the multilingual Wikisource).

Marcus Buck

----------

From: Theo Homan <theohoman at yahoo.com>
Subject: LL-L "Technica" 2009.03.06 (04) [E]

> From: Roger Thijs, Euro-Support, Inc.
> <roger.thijs at euro-support.be>
> Subject: LL-L Technica
>

[...]

> 1 - What about legal rights?
>
> - Can we scan, and publish on the web, an original print,
> after the author
> is dead for at least 70 years?

[...]

>

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Technica

[...]

>
> I let others answer about the copyright issue. I'm not
> well versed at that
> and would like to know the answer myself.

 Hi,

Yes, oh yes, everybody would like to know.
The copyright issue is complicated; especially in the usa.
If my memory is serving me: the Walt Disney Corporation has made it more
complicated than ever by their juridical actions to protect their products
for ever.

But in general: for educational and scholarly publications and purposes the
rules are much less strict, provided the texts are of a limited extent, and
are not intended as a golddigging vehicle.

I'm wondering that a couple of usa university lawyers still haven't sorted
it out for the [internet] publicum.

vr.gr.
Theo Homan

----------

From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Technica

My name isn't Roger, but for myself I say, "Thanks lots and lots, guys."

So, just for people like *moi* who are a little slower on the uptake ...

 Example scenario:
An author has been dead for over 70 years. Someone finds his or her poems
scattered on bits of paper all over a musty attic. The finder collects these
found poems and publishes them in an anthology. This is clearly the only
published source of that poet's works. Can someone else then use the poems
in his or her own publication without asking for permission?

Theo, you wrote:

I'm wondering that a couple of usa university lawyers still haven't sorted
it out for the [internet] publicum.

I wonder if this is because it's too easy to be sued in this country. If you
explain the law and publish it, and someone then commits a crime and says
it's because he or she thought it wasn't a crime because of the wording of
your explanation ... Oops! (It can be like that with medical advice as
well.) So I guess the only really safe way is to publish the entirety of the
copyright laws without your own comments, interpretation and explanation.
This is just my hunch.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

•

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