[INDOLOGY] NGMCP images and copyright law

[Harry Spier]

Dear everyone,
To be more specific about what I'm trying to find out.  Under the agreement
between the project and the Nepal government and under international
copyright law, when if ever, can  manuscript photographs from the project
legally in someones possession be made available on the internet.
Thanks,
Harry Spier


On Sun, Apr 10, 2022 at 11:02 AM Stefan Baums <baums at lmu.de> wrote:

> Dear Jonathan,
>
> > I am not a lawyer
>
> here is an article by someone who is:
>
>    https://scholarship.kentlaw.iit.edu/ckjip/vol13/iss1/6/
>
> > it is NOT possible to claim copyright on two dimensional
> > reproductions of two dimensional objects (not only mss but also
> > paintings for example) which themselves are not subject to
> > copyright
>
> and they do indeed come to the same conclusion as you.
>
> > What *can* be exterted is contact rights
>
> Yes, that is the true mechanism by which holding institutions,
> collectors, and scholars with manuscript stashes keep them to
> themselves. There is appently no law that says that just because
> somebody has a copyright-free object or image, they have to make
> it available to you.
>
> > if I were to take, for instance, the University of Washington
> > Press volumes of Gandhari manuscripts and scan the images (NOT
> > the text) there is nothing they could do about it
>
> That is true of the raw images reproduced in those volumes, though
> an intellectual effort establishing a basis for copyright could
> probably be claimed for the reconstructed images.
>
> (In any case, as far as this publication series is concerned, the
> UW Press has agreed to make all volumes starting with the
> forthcoming GBT 7 freely available under an open-access license,
> and the plan is to extend this new arrangement to the existing
> volumes once their back stock has sold out.)
>
> All best,
> Stefan
>
> --
> Stefan Baums, Ph.D.
> Institut für Indologie und Tibetologie
> Ludwig‐Maximilians‐Universität München
>
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