Talk:Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition

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[edit] Copyright in the UK/Europe

Is it not more copyrighted in European Union? I think not all authors died from more than 70 years (See Copyright law of the European Union). Is this wrong? What law is applied to intellectual works with so many authors that is impossible to check all dead date? -- Armando82 23:54, 5 January 2007 (UTC)

The last time I checked UK copyright law (about ten years ago, some things have changed), works created "for hire" were owned by the body or organisation putting up the money, allowing organisational works (particularly encyclopedias) to have rights that persist independently of the lives and deaths of the writers. In the case of an encyclopedia, the organisation itself is the copyright owner, not the people who happen to have been hired to write individual articles. Since Encyclopedia Brittanica is still going strong, and hasn't "died", this would tend to suggest that the 1911 edition might still be very much in copyright in the UK. Organisational copyrights can last rather a long time. Part of the reason why the US and US use different Bibles by default is that the old King James Bible is still copyright. Or open the flyleaf of a recent copy of Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, and you'll see that its still supposed to be the copyright of the University of California (who produced that revised translation). Even though the people who worked on that edition of the book died a long time ago, the UoC is still "alive".
AFAIK, the idea associated with the EB1911 stub ... that any publication produced before a certain date is automatically non-copyright ... might be USA-specific. We shouldn't suggest that a work that is PD in the USA is also PD in the UK or Europe, unless we have further supporting information. ErkDemon 16:22, 10 September 2007 (UTC)
According to the Copyright law of the United Kingdom article, the EB1911 is a joint work, and as such is protected only during 70 years from publication (note that this period is not USA-specific). The only exception, which actually makes copyright protection harder to implement, is that if someone wants to sue someone else for copyright infringement, then permission is required from all the original authors of the joint work. In any case, as far as I understand, there is no copyright problem here. -- Gabi S. 23:56, 8 November 2007 (UTC)
Two different issues have been brought up here. The first was that of joint work copyright (related to work for hire). The second, which I will address, is translations of works already in the public domain, the example being Newton's Principia. Anybody who wants to can make and copyright their own translation of the Principia, though why one would do so given the excellent translation available is another matter.
If, however, one wanted to quote from Newton in English a passage longer than what fair use permits could without anyone's permission do (or pay to have done) their own translation of such passage. If they paid for it, the copyright of the translation would be one of work for hire; for issues of its duration see Work for hire section (2) Copyright duration.
Theoretically, one does not need the copyright holder's permission to translate a work not yet in the public domain, but doing so is very foolish, as one cannot publish it or circulate it beyond the limits of fair use, which are very limiting indeed! It is not uncommon for scholars to translate short passages of works under copyright for use in papers or talks, but the limit is the same as the amount that might be quoted from the original without permission. It is, however, good form to ask permission to do so, even if it is within fair use. Robert Greer (talk) 22:50, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] "dated literary devices which often confound a modern reader"

I'm not persuaded this is true. I notice there's a cite (to a non-internet source, so I can't verify its specifics) on this sentence; perhaps it should read, "So and so wrote, 'This uses a lot of dated...'" As I said, I find it a questionable claim anyway. It's a different style of writing, but saying it "confounds" people is a bit excessive. Unless someone can point to a passage that's truly so "alien" to modern sensibilities that an intelligent person can't figure it out. --GenkiNeko 19:18, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Law

I have added law to the list "science, technology, and medicine, " in the section 1911 Britannica in the 21st century because it cropped up in the Wikipedia article Annexation. The original article was added to massively when text from EB1911 was dumped into it Revision as of 10:37, 3 September 2005. The trouble is that such text can not possibly cover the very lage changes that have taken place in international law over the last 95 years (UN charter just for one). So for many legal issues EB1911 is not a reliable source. --Philip Baird Shearer 10:32, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Charles Simmons

the internal link to Charles Simmons within wikipedia itself is wrong. The Charles Simmons who put together with someone else an anthology of readings from the Britannica Eleventh Edition is NOT the lniked-to Charles Simmons....He could not have been born in the 1800s and I know he is a contemporary writer...he wrote Powdered Eggs among other novels. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.0.158.66 (talk) 01:04, 17 September 2007 (UTC)

(The above comment moved from an inappropriate location) Please feel free to make those changes. Wikipedia is a wiki. David Brooks 03:20, 17 September 2007 (UTC)
I've created a disambiguation page to fix the obvious error but knowing nothing of the author I'll leave to others the writing.--Doug.(talk • contribs) 02:16, 7 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] article length

The topic of short articles often comes up on Wikipedia, so I think it would be good to explore that a little. The smallest article I have seen in EB1911 is Accius/s:1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Accius. John Vandenberg 03:05, 22 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] POV

(Excuse the lack of tagging/markup) "It also allows the original Encyclopedia Britannica text to be corrupted by contributors; for example, as of September 14, 2007, the article Mormons contains unreverted substantive changes to the main text that had been in place for five months." Corrupted? Sounds a bit like an opinion to me 71.167.31.98 (talk) 04:51, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

I was using the term in a technical sense to indicate that the website's text could be intentionally changed from the ur-text. I think that's what you would call it if an old, established text is modified by intervening scribes and presented back to the reader. It wasn't intended pejoratively, as you seem to suggest. David Brooks (talk) 05:15, 20 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Controversial quotes

Just to confirm that a couple of quotes removed for not being real really are. This is page 845 of volume 1, on which the success of the rebels in the US War of Independence is attributed in part to "a population mainly of good English blood and instincts" (last para of first column). This is the Negro article on page 344 of Volume 19, in which it is stated that ""Mentally the negro is inferior to the white... the arrest or even deterioration of mental development [after adolescence] is no doubt very largely due to the fact that after puberty sexual matters take the first place in the negro's life and thoughts." (last para of second column). (All links to Tim Starling's scanned pages on Wikisource, as linked to from our page Wikipedia:1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica. You'll need a TIFF reader like AlternaTIFF to read these; here is a PNG version of the first page, but the second is only in TIFF.)

That isn't to say that these are crucial things which must be in; but they shouldn't be removed because they're not in Britannica, because they are :-) TSP (talk) 00:01, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Thank you for your help

i am still not sure why the point about the contemporous racism/eugenics/sexism in the Eleventh Edition was removed - it's like those movies that depict 1907 as just a funny version of 2007 with no mention of the corsets or that you could be legally beaten by your boyfriend or husband - as my great grandmother was for daring to speak up to her husband during a dinner party.

Margaret Anne —Preceding unsigned comment added by 144.131.33.31 (talk) 00:22, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

I think that people remove the quotes out of genuine belief that they are not real. I have to say that when I first read the 'Negro' quote I didn't believe it - this is under 100 years ago, after all - four centuries after there was first a black courtier in the English court, a century after slavery was abolished in the UK, and over 40 years after there was first an African-American US Senator. It really is there, though. Slavery in the United States#Historiography_of_American_slavery, though, records that attitudes regarding black people as essentially mentally incapable dominated historical writing until the 1940s. TSP (talk) 00:36, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
Yep, I added that originally. I put a note on the talk page (Talk:Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition/Archive 2#.22Negro.22_quote) because I figured people wouldn't believe it.—Chowbok ☠ 01:10, 11 January 2008 (UTC)
I knew the quotes were real, but I find their inclusion in the article somehow gratuitous, at best titillating and and at worst a backdoor way of continuing the insult. I really think the assertion (truism, really) that the encyclopaedia reflects its times stands by itself without the labored illustration. Maybe a simple citation pointing to the source would be more appropriate. I'd vote to remove. By the way, the subsequent sentences in EB1911 display a remarkably more modern view (that intelligence tests are culture-specific and western views of intelligence are essentially self-serving).
Quite separately, is it safe to create a permalink to Tim Starling's archive? I thought he regarded the scan dump as essentially temporary, although it's been there forever. David Brooks (talk) 06:12, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Download entire collection in djvu

Just to say you can download the entire collection through BitTorrent at the Pirate Bay. I assume that because the original was gotten from Wikisource, in individual page tiff files, the torrent and data hosted at piratebay are legitimate. Yes, the material is under GNU FDLThis should be worth mentioning on the main page for those who may want to download chunks or the whole encyclopedia. Britannica collection, djvu --Randomuser756756 (talk) 06:45, 21 March 2008 (UTC)