Re: Re: Scanning books into electronic format

Joseph Pietro Riolo wrote:

> On 8/30/06, Samuel Murray <leuce[_at_]absamail.co.za> wrote:

>> What would you say about the legality of scanning a book into electronic >> format so that you can more easily search it? ...

> Based on your description, it seems obvious that it is a copyright
> infringement.

I suspect you're right. It just seems to unfair, though, that the knowledge contained in that volume should be lost like that.

What happened was that we discovered some old glossaries and reference lists while cleaning a store. These glossaries are over 40 years old, perhaps older, and were copied using some wax typed sheet process. It is likely that they had not been used for decades. There is no indication of who the author or editors or "publisher" were.

Although the text is fading, it is still legible and probably will be for several years to come. The information is mostly in an order which might have been useful in the days before computers, but which is of little use to us (but if the data was searchable, it would have been an enourmously useful source of information for us, for we regularly encounter the type of jobs which might require that information which is in the glossaries). For example there is a list of laws from the past 90 years, but these are listed alphabetically, and to be useful to us, they would have to be listed by date or number (or have some sort of index).

I have made some attempts to discover the origins of the glossaries, but most organisations which may have been involved in creating them, no longer exist. It just seems a shame that the information should be lost to us. I doubt if the copies we have are the only copies in existence, but the fact that they were wax sheet copied suggests to me that these volumes were formerly inhouse documents not widely distributed.

But I see your point... copyright must be respected.

Samuel Received on Wed Sep 06 2006 - 02:55:00 GMT