Author: Roger Pearse at ToA

The Times reports that Truro Cathedral have sold off all their pre-1800 books.  Charmingly they accepted a bid of only $72,000.  The dealer who bought them sold them on for more than $1m, and is now retiring from business.  Details of the historic library and the dispersal are here.

I have a page on my website the finds of manuscripts at Kellis in the Dakhla Oasis in Egypt, with some photographs of pages of the books, which I found online. Today I had a kind email from Dr Colin Hope of Monash University in Australia. He asked me to remove them, as they were his copyright, and of course I have done so. No blame to him; he was polite about it, and is quite within his rights to ask this.  I would respect his wishes anyway, as the leader of the excavations. But this is a first for me, not least since I avoid copyright material like the plague.  There was a time online when images routinely wandered all over the web.

I wonder if there is a larger issue which perhaps should be considered. Most scholars are funded out of general taxation. Is it quite proper that the results should be copyright to a particular scholar, or university? Shouldn’t the copyright vest in the public? Does it benefit either the public or scholarship to prevent images of excavation finds being circulated? If so, how; if not, should we allow this to happen?

Perhaps this is another area where the law has yet to catch up with the existence of the internet and the consequent implications.

I am mildly stunned and impressed! The Academia Belgica in Rome hold the papers of Franz Cumont. I wrote to them asking whether they had copies of an unpublished Italian translation of part of Ms. Mingana 142, and I got a very nice email back from Dr Pamela Anastasio, the librarian, confirming that they did, and offering options for photocopies (0.5 euros) or jpgs (1 euro) of the 6 pages. Of course they take money by bank-to-bank transfer, as European libraries tend to do. Being in the UK, it was going to cost me 21 euros to send 6 euros, and I asked if I could just send a 10 euro note by post. By return I got an email with the jpgs on, and agreement. It is astonishing to encounter such helpfulness, well beyond the path of duty. I certainly never expected the items before I had paid for them. Well done the Academia Belgica! Long may they flourish!

I wish that I could think of any means to repay their kindness.

I have online the first 800 years of the History of the Coptic Patriarchs of Alexandria.  But more exists in various publications, and I keep getting emails from Copts about it.  However one version that I know of is of uncertain status, not least because I cannot find out what Egyptian copyright law actually is! 

Now I was able to find this poster issued by the software alliance in Cairo:

“The copyright law in Egypt No 354 of 1954, amended in 1968 and 1975, was amended for the third time by the law No 38 in 1992 to cover explicitly the protection of computer programs.  In 1994 it was amended for the fourth time to make the protection period applicable to computer software fifty years from the author’s date of decease, or from the publishing date if the author was a legal person.”

This is supported by this site which states:

“The Copyright Law No. 354 for 1954, which was modified by the Law No. 29 for 1994, allows for copyrightable work in general and computer software in particular. Egypt is also a party to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, ( PARIS Acts) and the TRIPS. Original works of literature, art and science, regardless of type, importance or purpose are protected. This includes works of art expressed in writing, sound, drawings, photography and motion pictures, such as books, writings, speeches, oral works, plays, dramatic works, musical compositions, films, phonographic works, applied art, 3-D works and computer programmes are protected for the lifetime of the author plus 50 years following his/her death.  In order for protection to be effective, the work of art is to be original and includes personal efforts, innovation and new arrangement.”

So for texts it seems to be life+50 years, as in Canada.

Update (29/08/07): This link confirms this, and includes the text of the 2002 law which indicates that where there are several authors, the last survivor’s date of death applies.  It still doesn’t make clear whether this applies retroactively, but I think that I will presume that it does.  http://www.agip.com/ clarifies that the older laws were cancelled and replaced by the 2002 one. My thanks to Dr Amir H. Khoury of Tel Aviv
University for clarifying some issues pertainig to Egyptian Copyright law.

I have today received what is possibly one of the most depressing emails that I have seen in many years.  It’s a threatening email from someone I’ve never heard of. He says that he is the moderator of the CCEL site.  He wants to know why I’m “selling their work” (i.e. including an old public domain version of the Ante-Nicene Fathers files from their site on my CDROM of the Additional Fathers) and tells me that I’ll “be hearing from our business office”. 

What makes this depressing is the origin of it; the CCEL.  I suppose that this could be a hoax, but I have my doubts.  If genuine, it marks the passing of one of the champions and pioneers of open access online.

As far as I knew, the files and their contents are public domain in every jurisdiction in the world.  But who will feel able to use them freely — include them in CDROM’s, as I have done, or any other form of distribution — if they get threats when they do?

When I first came onto the internet in 1997, the presence at CCEL of the 38-volume collection of the fathers, freely copyable by anyone, was a shining example to us all.  It was all public domain, and everyone could do anything they wanted with it.  This led to a burst of imitative sites, and was the direct inspiration for everything that I have done online myself in the Tertullian Project and the Additional Fathers.

But times have changed.  If this email is right, it seems that it is dwindling into another commercial site, with emphasis on its ‘rights’, on control, on owning, licensing.   A look at the fresh new copyright notice on its site makes that clear.

I’ve written to Harry Plantinga, founder of the CCEL, to query this one. But whatever he replies, the direction in which the CCEL is going seems all too clear.  Stupidly enough, 10 years after a public domain version of the ANF appeared online, we may need to create one again, whose copyright status as public domain is clear and unassailable.  I think also of those who gave their time freely to help produce the current, version 3, of the ANF etc. 

One measure I have taken is to remove a couple of items from the Additional Fathers whose copyright status is profoundly unclear, since they were published in Egypt at a time when that country had no copyright law at all. After all, I don’t want to get a threatening letter in a few years time demanding money.   Who benefits from this, tho, I don’t know.  Sic transit gloria mundi.

Update 21/8/7:Harry has intervened, and the threat has gone away for now. Only the version 3 files and their derivatives are claimed to be in copyright; and that only so that there is a revenue stream from commercial publishers to keep the site alive after he moves on or retires or whatever. I’m still discussing this with the CCEL.