From my diary

An evening of uploading.  I’ve added a few more volumes of the RealEncyclopadie (all pre-1923, of course) to Archive.org, which will doubtless appear in the search in a few days.   There are now the first 16 volumes accessible there. 

I had an email from the German wikisource project, working on digitising the RE there.  It contained this very interesting observation:

Another trick question is the copyright status. Over 1100 people (mostly white European males) have been working for the RE from 1891 to 1978 under the seven editors. The copyright (as viewed by German and European jurisdiction) rests in the single authors which we at Wikisource document here: http://de.wikisource.org/wiki/RE/A

Strictly speaking, a volume is, as a whole, in copyright as long as any author who contributed to it is not in the Public Domain. For example in case of vol. I [publ. 1893/1894], the Tübingen Professor Wilhelm Schmid (who died in 1951) was supposedly the last surviving contributer, so this volume won’t be PD (as a whole) before 2022. There are, also, authors who died before they could see their articles published (for example Heinr. Wilh. Schaefer and Leop. Schmidt who died in 1892). As for the more recent authors: The oldest surviving author has to be Emmanuel Kriaras (b. 1906 and still very active in Thessaloniki); the youngest is Herbert Bannert (b. 1950).

Isn’t that absurd?  That a volume published in 1893 is in copyright now, in Germany?  No doubt the Germans set up the EU copyright as well.

Someone also wrote to me to say that volume 1 of Cyril of Alexandria’s commentary on John (English version, 1874, by P.E.Pusey) has vanished from Archive.org.  A quick visit, and it had indeed been withdrawn, for unspecified “issues”.  It can’t be copyright, so this is weird.  I ended up making my own PDF from the image scans I made back in 2005, and uploading it here.    I didn’t crop the pages from the photocopies, since back in 2005 Google Books didn’t exist and I was uploading HTML scans.  So it’s a bit rough, but will do the job.

I’ve been mirroring my Google mail account to my hard disk.  Since I started using it in January 2008, I have sent or received 9,790 emails.  Um.  I wonder how long that took, and what I could have been doing more usefully in the time!  I can’t easily count the number of emails in my main client — must be a frightening number!

I’d hoped to start proof-checking the Latin of Eusebius this evening, but it will have to wait until tomorrow now.

Share

4 thoughts on “From my diary

  1. Copyright is one thing, but what does this mean:
    “mostly white European males”?

  2. The correspondent is based at a US university, which seem to be under the control of traitors or fellow-travellers. Undermining western civilisation was a Soviet policy, and their stooges are still at it.

  3. Could the disappearance of Cyril/John/Pusey be related to an announced new trans of that work? The same publisher recently told us in a blurb that Ambrosiaster means “star of Ambrose” – Yikes! I’d get ‘six of the best’ for that back in my school. (So ‘poetaster’ is a ‘star poet’!)
    Some “archived” works are being republished a) by original publisher (OK); by other “publishers” – with new ISBN and copyright date!!! This can cause problems. Am looking at Wordworth/White New Testament “retypeset” (?) from original, with an introductory page of drivel. The monks of St. Jerome (Rome – now dispersed) produced a massive critical edition of Jerome’s Vulgate Old Testament (this is NOT the Nova Vulgata). They never planned a New Test. and packed their bags when the OT was finished. The pocket W-W/NT (even in larger type) is not a complement to their OT. “Stuttgart” is the closest – but the full NT critical ed (W-W/Oxford) is (was last week!!) also in ether-space.

  4. Poetaster = “star poet”, instead of “pseudo-poet”…? hmmm! I think not…

    I’m all in favour of a new translation, but I don’t see how that ought to affect the accessibility of old ones, do you? But it’s an interesting coincidence, I admit.

    Yes, I find it amusing how people perpetrate copyfraud on out of copyright work. If I were a rich man I’d have a tame firm of lawyers and put a stop to such goings on.

Leave a Reply