Closed Knowledge

This page lists examples of closed knowledge packages, sites or projects. If you create another page which is about closed knowledge you can have it show up here by putting CategoryClosed somewhere in your page.

Here is a list of all pages containing the CategoryClosed wiki tag:

  1. closed
  2. package/national statistics uk
  3. package/oclc
  4. package/repec

Bibliomaina.com

Bibliomania.com (went bankrupt) but from site we have:

What is the copyright status of texts on Bibliomania.com?

Most texts on our site are in the public domain. However Bibliomania.com Ltd has copyright in the HTML versions we have created for our web site. You are free to download these texts for personal use, but they may not be used for any commercial purpose, or republished in any form (including on the internet) without our prior email permission. Bibliomania.com Ltd has and will take legal action worldwide to protect its rights.

Please use the comments board to email us for copyright permission.

How do I cite a Bibliomania work?

We do not have full bibliographic data for the texts on Bibliomania, and they were typed from scratch, repaginated and reformatted hence these works are an original edition and should be cited as copyright Bibliomania.com Ltd 2000.

genuki.org.uk/big/eng/YKS/

Genuki is historical and geneaological information including information on Yorkshire. Claims aren't in relation to copyright (although what copyright in 100 year old photographs could you have) but in the assertion of database rights in information much of which comes from 1892.

http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/YKS/Misc/conditions.html

((( All the material which is to be found on the Genuki Yorkshire site (any page which has a URL starting with "www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/YKS/") is held in a database by me, and software to which I own the copyright, is used to extract the relevant data and generate the pages which you see on the Genuki Yorkshire site. A United Kingdom Act of 1997 specifically covers the compiling and use of database material. The notice below is required to be displayed in order to give me protection under this Act: Database Right, all databases used for this website are covered by the 1997 Database Regulations. Colin Hinson (and others as stated on the relevant pages) are the makers of the database used for this website and the owner of the database rights. First published in 1997. )))

Music Databases

Music databases (including open ones such as mutopia) claim copyright in the typesetting of their musical scores. While there is a compilation type copyright (for presentation) in most jurisdictions, I don't really see how this would cover the representation of the score in a musical notation such as lilypond or **kern when the original music is out of copyright.

One of the more outrageous (and stupid) examples of using this copyright to close access is on http://www.musedata.org/ (what makes it particularly bad is that this is academic project):

The research license: http://www.musedata.org/legal/licen.html -- MuseData files are provided free of charge to academic and non-commercial users but they remain the intellectual property of the Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities, Braun #129, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305-3067, USA.

Before downloading any materials from this site, please indicate your acceptance of the terms of this license agreement

All other prospective users must contact the Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities, Braun #129, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-3076, USA, before downloading, copying, or redistributing any data, in whole or in part, as found here or in derivative versions, in any format, electronic or otherwise, found at this site. --

The same site also runs themefinder which starts off its about page with:

Shakespeare

Given Shakespeare's public domain status is incredible how much stuff claims copyright in his works or in related info. e.g.

Open Source Shakespeare

Despite its name bears the statement at the bottom of each page:

Program code and database © 2003-2006 Bernini Communications LLC. If copyrighted, texts are the property of their respective owners. About the texts used in OSS • Privacy policy

Does contain interesting info on the way most shakespeare texts end up being copyrighted again:

UK (ex-) Government Data

National archives

Not yet investigated properly

None: closed (last edited 2006-11-05 12:03:14 by rgrp)