Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries says that its project to digitise images and make them available for free has now passed its 1 millionth image.
Most of the images on Digital Bodleian are made available under a Creative Commons non-commercial license, with attribution (CC-BY-NC 4.0). This means that users are able to use, distribute, remix, and adapt the images made available on Digital Bodleian, for non-commercial purposes — so long as you credit the Library as the source.
Commercial use is available – for a fee.
Launched in 2015, the Digital Bodleian website is a free resource that covers everything from illuminated manuscripts from medieval Europe and centuries-old maps to Victorian board games and British political election posters from the last 100 years.
Oxford, Bodleian Library (E) C17:70 London (10)
The one-millionth image to be digitized was from an original notebook of poet Jenny Joseph, who studied at St Hilda’s College and maintained a connection with Oxford all her life. It shows the first draft of her poem, ‘Warning’, which was voted the ‘nation’s favourite poem’ in a BBC poll in 2006.
The digital library is here.
This is blatant copyfraud – the images are in the public domain already, so you can’t apply extra restrictions like non-commercial (which makes no sense anyway) or requiring attribution.
You might want to check your facts first – while an underlying image can be out of copyright, the scanned version is not. You are free to visit the library and take a scan of the image yourself and release that scan for free, but there’s no obligation on anyone to do so.
If it’s a faithful reproduction, you don’t get a new copyright of it. It’s disputed/a grey area in law technically, but see things like Bridgemen vs. Corel in the US.
We’re not in the US. Can’t you just be pleased they’re making such an effort to preserve for future generations?
“edited by ianVisits to remove rude response – please keep comments civil”