http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue53/ooman-tzouvaras/

"Europe's audiovisual heritage contains both a record and a representation of the past and as such it demonstrates the development of the 'audiovisual culture' we inhabit today. In this article we hope to offer an insight into the development of the Video Active Portal which provides access broadcast heritage material retained by archives across Europe. We will explain how Video Active needed to find solutions for managing intellectual property rights, semantic and linguistic interoperability and the design of a meaningful user experience. We will also mention the use of Semantic Web technology and the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) as main components at the back-end of the Portal."

OA to 126 years of research from the American Museum of Natural History
By Peter Suber
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007/11/oa-to-126-years-of-research-from.html

The American Museum of Natural History is now providing OA to the full back runs of all four of its journal and book series:

American Museum Novitates (from 1921)
Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History (from 1907)
Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History (from 1881)
Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History (1893 - 1930)
(Thanks to antropologi.info.)

Comment. AMNH launched its institutional repository in January 2006 and has been very busy filling it up ever since.

http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/dspace/

Some museums are progressive in allowing free scholarly use of their images (e.g. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Victoria and Albert Museum), but I don't know of another museum with its own OA repository, let alone the AMNH's commitment to filling it. Kudos to all involved.

http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007/11/whether-or-not-to-allow-derivative.html

I disagree with Peter Suber and agree with PLoS and its position:

The Creative Commons web site explains the meaning of “no derivative works” as follows: “You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work”. This is not open access.

Its a clear misinterpretation of Budapest when Subers cites the definition as argument that derivative use isn't allowed:

The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

To control the integrity is a moral right and has nothing to do with a license formula. It's the same as the "responsible use of the published work" in the Berlin declaration which allows explicitely derivative works.

Harnad is denying the need of re-use. Suber has often argued for the reduction of PERMISSION BARRIERS and his personal position to prefer a CC-BY use is honest but his opinion that CC-ND is compatible with BBB and also OA is absolutely disappointing. And it's false too.

See also:
http://wwmm.ch.cam.ac.uk/blogs/murrayrust/?p=761

An auction took place in South Carolina at the end of September that highlights two issues in the world of book and manuscript collecting, one legal, one financial. The items in question were a group of Civil War letters, including three from Robert E. Lee. [...]

In recent years, many states have aggressively pursued their claims to documents long ago purloined from their archives, even though the current owners were far removed from any such taking. A few years ago, the State of North Carolina was able to secure the return of its copy of the Declaration of Independence, confiscated by a returning Ohio soldier at the end of the Civil War. There is no statute of limitations on these claims. However, the claims have now been extended, and in some states such as Texas recognized by statute, to items that disappeared years ago under unknown circumstances. They were not necessarily stolen. The documents may have been thrown away, sold, given away...who knows? If a state can claim it is/was a state document, it may have a case. Such was the belief of South Carolina, which sued Willcox for the papers. They obtained a restraining order the day before the original sale was to take place.

Willcox, who had invested money in appraisals, promptly filed bankruptcy, which allowed him to contest ownership of the papers in the Federal Bankruptcy Court. He lost there, but won on appeal to the Federal District Court. The State responded by appealing that decision, arguing in September of 2006 before the Federal Appeals Court. There, South Carolina lost again. The Appeals Court ruled in a case such as this, without a clear chain of title, eyewitnesses, and the like, it is necessary to look to the "common law," where, the Court noted, "possession is nine-tenths of the law." That put the burden on the State to prove it owned the documents, either through some evidence of title or recent possession. It could show neither.

Read more at:
http://www.americanaexchange.com/NewAE/aemonthly/article.asp?f=1&id=558&page=1&start=

Peter Kurilecz in Archives-List

The following link will take you to a website that shows a new digital
image of DaVinci's Last Supper that was done at 16 billion megapixels
http://www.haltadefinizione.com/en/cenacolo/look.asp

wait for it to fully load and then be amazed at how much you can see
when you zoom in

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Sarah_Bernhardt&oldid=166568963#Image_copyright

For the US see Bridgeman v. Corel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_v._Corel

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/2308/125/

"The International Music Score Library Project was a quiet Canadian success story. Using wiki technologies, it emerged over the past two years as a leading source of public domain music scores, hosting thousands of scores uploaded by a community of students, teachers, and others in the music community. The site was very careful about copyright - only those works in the public domain (as many readers will know, public domain in Canada is life of the author plus an additional 50 years) were hosted on Canadian servers and the site was responsive to complaints about possible infringements.

On Friday, the site was taken down. Universal Edition AG, a German publisher, retained a Toronto law firm to send a cease and desist letter to the Canadian-based site claiming that the site was infringing the copyright of various composers. It appears that the issue was not that posting the works in Canada infringed copyright but rather that some of the works were not yet in the public domain in Europe, where the copyright term runs for an additional 20 years at life of the author plus 70 years. As is so often the case, a labour of love for a large, non-profit community was wiped out with a single legal demand letter.

In this particular case, UE demanded that the site use IP addresses to filter out non-Canadian users, arguing that failing to do so infringes both European and Canadian copyright law. It is hard to see how this is true given that the Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that sites such as IMSLP are entitled to presume that they are being used in a lawful manner and therefore would not rise to the level of authorizing infringement. The site was operating lawfully in Canada and there is no positive obligation in the law to block out non-Canadians.

As for a European infringement, if UE is correct, then the public domain becomes an offline concept, since posting works online would immediately result in the longest single copyright term applying on a global basis. That can't possibly be right. Canada has chosen a copyright term that complies with its international obligations and attempts to import longer terms - as is the case here - should not only be rejected but treated as copyright misuse. "

From the Comments:

"Written by Jean-Baptiste Soufron on 2007-10-21 13:04:26
Actually, there is a precedent since I had the honour to help the canadian website \"les classiques des sciences sociales\" that was threatened by a famous French book publisher. In the end we concluded that the canadian website had the right to publish public domain work online, even when these works were not yet public domain in France."

See also
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007/10/more-on-international-race-to-bottom.html
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/21/0559220

Update:
http://excesscopyright.blogspot.com/2007/10/universal-edition-ag-lawyer-responds.html