danschorr wrote:Dunno about the copyright issues, but I don't think scanning the plates and putting them on the Internet as a resource would deprive anyone of their livelihood or force their families into abject poverty
Jeam Belaubre is still alive and his ownership of HIS work (copyright) is still intact. I believe he would object most strenuously to your placing his work in the public domain without his permission. It is NOT a question of depriving someone of their livelihood. It is a question of respecting a person's intellectual property rights, something you seem to think is frivilous.
You couldn't be more wrong about my thinking it frivolous, which is why I stated I did not know what the current copyright situation is. I certainly would not put
Les triomphes de Louis XIV on the net myself, not only because I do not own that particular work but also because I have no idea as to whether that would be legally possible.
However, when a particular work is no longer in print and without any prospect of being re-published, the issue of its possible reproduction on the internet should not be seen as a taboo : it doesn't mean that it
should be done but it's an option which
may at least be discussed, even if in the end everyone agrees on the conclusion that this is not a desirable move. This is something Mats himself had suggested here a couple of years ago in any case.
And if you still think I'm taking the IP issue lightly, I am a published author myself. In my professional field, (which isn't military history), I have written material which is now out of print and unlikely to be picked up by another publisher and which I am happy to see available for free on the Internet where it can still be of use to some instead of lying dormant. I'm not gaining any profit from it, but I have at least the satisfaction of knowing that what my intellectual work still enjoys a life of its own - though I'm aware of the fact that this isn't a very lawyer-like perspective on IP issues
One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know.