Tag: Information access

UK National Gallery threatens Wikipedia, tries copyfraud tactics

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A story with some important implications has broken in the last few days.  It concerns items in the UK, which are out of copyright and unique and owned by the public. 

UK state bodies claim copyright of any photographs under English law and use their position as custodians to prevent access to them in this way.   This claim has never been tested and may be legally dubious even in the UK.  It is fairly certainly invalid in the US, for instance.  A great many state bodies — the British Library comes to mind — do the same, abusing their position to obstruct access to the public.  The object of the civil servants is to make money for their own institution, and let the public interest go hang. 

But now it may all come to court.  Whatever happens, that must be good news.

It seems that  the UK National Portrait Gallery has issued a copyright infringement letter to a US Wikipedia user, after he uploaded thousands of images from its website to Wikipedia.  The gallery started out pretty arrogantly, according to Techradar; the letter promptly appeared on Wikimedia.  TechRadar reports their next statement:

“The Gallery is very concerned that potential loss of licensing income from the high-resolution files threatens its ability to reinvest in its digitisation programme and so make further images available.”

They are concerned… about the loss of income.  Yes, indeed I’m sure they are.  The pictures belong to the public, the photos are paid for by the public, yet all they are concerned about is the income they can make from them.

Even in this statement, there is good news for us.  The Gallery has had to think of some reason why the public should support their actions.  They’ve had to acknowledge that “making images available” is what is expected of them.   They’ve had to acknowledge that Wikipedia making them available is in the public interest.

The gallery demands that the items be taken down, or they will sue, on the 20th July.  Let’s hope they do.  Just imagine how it works. 

First, imagine the court decides for the Gallery.  Then Wikipedia has to decide whether to pay any attention.  Wikipedia is based in the US.  It doesn’t give a damn about the UK.  So if the Gallery wants to enforce this, it has to travel to the US and convince a US judge that it is in the interests of people in the US that US people not see stuff in the UK.  The chances of this are minimal, as US courts are largely political and favour US people.  So the whole issue of daft UK copyright that harms only people in the UK will come squarely before the public eye.  In this situation, the need for a change to that law will become overpowering.

Second, imagine that the court decides against the Gallery.  This is even better, because it will bring UK law into line with US law.  It will bring an end to this copyfraud.

David Gerard rightly observes, “I can’t see this ending well for the National Portrait Gallery, whatever happens.”  But it most likely will end well for everyone in the UK.

The issue is being reported also in the Guardian, although no comment seems to be possible.

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Massive French site of translations from Latin, Greek, Syriac, Arabic, Georgian…

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve just come across this French site, http://remacle.org/.  It contains a simply enormous amount of French translations, often with parallel original text.  Partly the site is a portal; but much is actually at the site itself.  It seems to be the work of a collective, although lots of stuff is by  Marc Szwajcer, and on the site itself.  The Armenian history Agathangelos is there.  Agapius is there — I wish I’d known, for I had to scan this myself for my own English translation.  A work by Severus Sebokht on the Astrolabe is there.  Letters of Jerome are there.

Among the gems are the poems of Claudian, and those of Sidonius Apollinaris, including his panegyric for the emperor Majorian, and his panegyric on his ineffectual successor, Anthemius.  Firmicus Maternus is there.  So is a lot of Photius.

“But what is this to me?” I hear you cry, “I don’t speak French.”  But Google translate is really very good for French.  So you really can make use of this, even so.

Stephen C. Carlson’s blog Hypotyposeis is not updated as often as it might be, so I only look in infrequently.  But I owe this tip to him.  Thank you!

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Online version of the Codex Sinaiticus; more manuscripts to follow

Posted on by Roger Pearse

We’ve all seen the PR for this online manuscript, which has even caused the servers to crash, although it is back now.  The PR has been very well managed, and it can only be a good thing that more interest is being generated in online manuscripts.  The announcement of more manuscripts at the Virtual Manuscript Room at Birmingham is well-timed.

I learn that the British Library is now beginning a pilot project to place some 250 Greek manuscripts online.  The project will be led by Juan Garces, who has been involved in the Sinaiticus project.  Clearly success begets success, and we can only hope that this marks the beginning of the end of the long hostility of the British Library to putting material on the internet.

Philip Comfort’s book Encountering the Manuscripts  – about New Testament manuscripts, including Sinaiticus – should be selling very well just now!

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Cambridge University Library – daft admissions policies

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I want to go up to Cambridge tomorrow and use the library.  I have a reader’s card; although, as a mere taxpayer, I’m only given one that expires every six months, and must pay £10 for the privilege.  Since I work — in order to support CUL with my taxes — I can only go up infrequently.  To renew, I have to sit in a queue in a dim room and wait.  I’ll have to do that (again) tomorrow.

I’ve just discovered that the poor dears are getting all precious about their admissions policy.  Apparently I have to bring my passport.  Yes; I have a photo ID card that they issued, I have been coming there for 11 years, but I have to bring my passport to prove who I am?

It’s understandable that a university which gets riff-raff from around the world may need to check who they are.  But hardly in my case, when I am renewing.  They also want a recent utility bill, for the same reason.  Frankly I’ve had less demands to visit a defence establishment! 

They also want me to produce again a letter of introduction proving that I am an appropriate person to handle rare books.  I’ve had this clearance for 10 years.  Why now?  Oh, and it must be someone with intimate knowledge of my research — yes, fine, except that for a private researcher who will know this?

I won’t bore you with the further, fussy, annoying details.  It’s the whole attitude that gets me.  I, as a respectable member of the public, who pays for the whole thing, is harassed with these absurd and petty regulations.  They do not benefit the library — on the contrary, they injure its reputation — and they injure me.

Why DO libraries do these things?  I wish I were a rich man.  I would get my lawyers to sort these people out in short order.

So… wasting time today gathering documents.

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The limitations of PDF textbooks

Posted on by Roger Pearse

We all know that textbooks are often best in searchable PDF form.  But yesterday I came across a case where they were not.  I wanted a French grammar, so that I can brush up on stuff for Agapius.  I found a bootleg PDF, thereby saving myself $25.  But… I found that what I wanted to do was read the thing in bed, just a bit at a time, skip pages, and generally absorb interesting stuff by osmosis.  I needed a book, in short.

So, yes, I went out and bought one.  It was the only way!

Worth remembering, when we talk about the death of the book.  Only some books will die.

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EThOS – still impressed

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An email from the British Library EThOS service popped into my inbox a couple of days ago.  It told me that a PDF of a PhD thesis was now available online for free download.  I’d “placed an order” (free) for this some time back, and here it was.

The thesis was The indica of ctesias of cnidus : text (incl. MSS monacensis gr. 287 and oxoniensis, holkham gr. 110), translation and commentary by Stavros Solomou, London 2007.  This link should find it.   The quality is excellent –  far better than the scans at the Bibliotheque Nationale Francais.

It would help if the site gave permalinks to theses.  Likewise, when an order is available, a link to the thesis details would help.

But I’m still dead impressed.  Whoever could have accessed something like this, before EThOS came along?  I have some slack time today; I would never have hunted this out, but now… here it is.  I get to read it, the author gets read, everyone benefits.

Well done the British Library.

The thesis itself is of considerable interest.  The Indica of Ctesias was used widely in ancient times, until John Tzetzes; and then suddenly is no longer mentioned.  This leads us to suppose that the last copy or copies perished in the sack of Constantinople in 1204 by the renegade army originally hired for the Fourth Crusade. 

An epitome exists in Photius.  But the author has obtained two additional unpublished mss, and edited these also.

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Dishonest academic journals and the Elsevier scandal

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Nick Nicholas’ blog also drew my attention to a scandal; a major academic publisher, Elsevier, running “fake” academic journals, which were in fact funded by a pharmaceutical company.  How bad this may be, well, I can’t tell.

Librarians — who pay for journal access, remember — are reacting strongly to this threat to the integrity of the journal system, and quite rightly too.  After all, if you can’t trust the publishers to act as gatekeepers — to keep out the rubbish and the advertising-pretending-to-be-research, your scientific research is screwed.  Terms like “corruption” have been used, and quite properly.

Such scandals undermine the reputation of the journal system.  In truth I think this is a minor hiccup.  Too many people have too much invested in the existing system for it all to go to hell very easily.

But Nick looks at the long-term trend, and how this incident may influence it (paragraphing mine).

The world is upside down, and will only get more so. If it’s not googleable, it doesn’t exist.

That’s calling much of the scholarly publishing market into question, and the medical payola scandal at Elsevier calls into question the remainder. Just found out about this today, and I’m still in shock.

Journal publishers don’t disseminate as broadly as a PDF on a website + google, and no-one cares about long-term availability anymore (not even the publishers, shirking away from paper).

Scholarly publishers’ key selling point now is their imprimatur, and once you piss that away through payola, you don’t recoup the loss of authority by blaming a rogue Australian subbranch, with staff who’ve since left your employ.

The future is… what?  Well, we don’t know.  But it won’t be paper-based journals, that’s for sure.

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An new hero takes on the ancient astronomical works

Posted on by Roger Pearse

I’ve just discovered http://www.wilbourhall.org/index.html.  This site deals with Mathematics, and Mathematical Astronomy in the works of ancient writers.  It does so by getting hold of whatever texts exist and fixing the errors in the Google scans and so forth.  If you want the complete works of Hero of Alexandria, they’re here.  Archimedes, Ptolemy… likewise.  Arabic writers?  They too.  The author, Joe Leichter, writes:

I hope to make available public domain materials that are essential for the study of ancient and early modern mathematics and mathematical astronomy. Google, for example, has done some things to achieve this through its books.google.com project. However, like most other efforts at digitally copying non digital materials, “mistakes were made”. For example, Google currently has several (all incomplete) versions of Teubner’s’s edition of Euclid available for download. Most of these unfortunately contain page after page that are illegible, missing, out of order or otherwise unusable.

The man is a hero.  Ancient scientific works are a horrendously neglected part of the ancient world, because they require skills and interest in both the humanities and the sciences.  Still more neglected are the Byzantine writers on this subject.

All this from a blog that I had not seen before, opuculuk by Nick Nicholas, reporting on a search that he did on the works of Chioniades.  (Nick works for the TLG, and was working on their lemmatizer, when he started to come across chunks of untranslated Arabic in the scientific works of Chioniades.  Mr. C., a 12th century writer, had been taking lessons from some Persian, so had got a whole load of jargon for his pains!)

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Irving Woodworth Raymond and Orosius

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The first English translation of Orosius was made by I.W.Raymond and published in 1936.  It’s probably still in copyright in the USA, unfortunately, which keeps it off the web.  A later translation exists in the Fathers of the Church series.

Someone wrote to me about Orosius today.  Apparently he is the first writer to mention the term “Asia minor”.  This led me to look again at the copyright.

When did Raymond die? (he was born in 1898, according to COPAC)  A google search led me to an obituary in the St. Petersburg Times, August 11, 1964:

NEW YORK — Dr Irving Woodworth Raymond, 65, professor of history at Brooklyn college here, died Monday at his home in York Harbor, Maine.

Isn’t Google books wonderful?  I remarked yesterday how the British Library, in putting newspapers online, made sure to charge for access; Google gives it to us for free, and we all benefit.

Sadly it looks as if his work won’t come out of copyright in the EU (life+70 years) until 2034, by which time I will be dead myself, I suspect.  In countries with life+50 years, that reduces to 2014.  And I can’t tell you when it comes out of copyright in the US, as I don’t understand the current situation; publication + 95 years, i.e. 2031?

What a mess this copyright law is!  Who benefits from keeping this offline?

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British Library still doesn’t get it

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The BBC has a belated but fawning story today, Just click for a century of news:

The British Library has put two million digitised pages from 19th century newspapers online, taking research out of its dusty reading rooms into people’s homes.

The pay-as-you-go service brings a century of history alive from Jack the Ripper to WC Grace. (etc)

Ah.  So, “just click”, eh?  What use is this to most of us?  Access for the privileged only, it seems.  Can you imagine any of us paying for this? 

But there is more, and worse, at the British Library site, where the new government “Digital Britain” report is discussed.

Digitising content

Dame Lynne said: “I welcome the fact that Lord Carter specifically referenced the British Library’s Nineteenth British Century Newspapers digitisation programme as an example of how new business models can enable national institutions to work with commercial partners and funding bodies to make millions of pages of historic content available online to researchers and the public. We are sitting on a goldmine of content which should be considered integral to the UK’s digital strategy. To support Digital Britain we need to deliver a critical mass of digitised content – sustained public investment, along with the innovative business models cited in Lord Carter’s report, will enable us to achieve this.”

I’ll bet she does.   Who else would endorse the idea of selling access, but the man who has just proposed taxing internet access? 

The reference to access for  “the public” is tacked on, as an afterthought.  The British Library, indeed, doesn’t exist to serve the public — in the opinion of all too many of its staff.  The vision of universal access to information and education is debased into a vision of more income for themselves.

There needs to be a culture change at the British Library.  The people who see the collection purely as a windfall to be exploited for their own budgetary gain need to be eased out.   An open-source public service attitude needs to replace it.  And it will.

It’s easy to get depressed by how out of touch the management of the British Library is.  Yet the pressure for open access grows stronger all the time.  The very idea of charging for this will seem absurd or disgusting in 10 years time.  Every year a flood of new staff will enter the British Library, carrying their iPhones with their built-in digital cameras and their WiFi-enabled devices of various sorts; and will try not to laugh at the policies they find.  These people will bring about the revolution.

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