#5 -
>>Putting materials into the Internet Archives of which you cannot claim "ownership" or "creation" may poison the well. Go reread the terms of use for the Internet Archives and tell me the wisdom of his approach ...

Hmmm. Yeah, I just read the terms. It looks like the whole point of the Internet Archives is to host public domain materials. So by posting public domain materials to the Archive, this professor is serving the purpose of the Archive.

#8 -
>>My point is that the irresponsible attitude of "Let's just put it up on the Internet Archives" damages the Archives in the long run.

I just don't get what is "irresponsible" here?? He's posting important public domain works to a site expressly designed for that purpose....

audiozoloft says:
>>BTW, ProQuest is claiming copyright on the digitized versions of the materials, of which they have done the heavy lifting to get online.

Just because ProQuest did "heavy lifting" to get docs online doesn't mean they have a copyright in those docs -- or any other right to stop people from copying or distributing the digitized documents (at least under US law).

A US copyright covers the content of a work, not the form in which it is published. If a work is in the public domain and I scan it and publish it online, I cannot claim a copyright to that content - so you are free to copy and re-publish my scans.

There are two exceptions to this rule. (1) if ProQuest adds new copyrightable content to the documents, they have a right to protect just that new content; and (2) a "collection" of public domain information is copyrightable, but only the unique way in which the information is collected and organized (e.g. the order of documents or the table of contents) is copyrightable, and only if that organization is original (e.g. alphabetical sorting doesn't count).

Neither of these exceptions would apply to someone merely redistributing an image that ProQuest scanned from a public domain document.