It would be even cooler if they weren't claiming copyright on their reproduction of public domain images. "The use of these contents for commercial purposes is subject to payment and covered by a license."
Even though I really don't agree with what the BnF is doing, I don't think you can call the National library some kind of "representative of the upper class".
It's the nation commercializing national property, which is far from ideal, but still hugely better than the pre-revolutionary situation.
You could definitely call Standford part of the upper class.
The BnF comes from the Royal library, and the new building was announced by the President of France. It's one of the upper class organisations that has moved through various types of governments from Royalty to Napolean to modern Presidents. Now it is supervised by the Ministry of Culture and Communication. 3000 people daily go through the reading rooms, which is a very small percentage of the French public -- less than 1%, less than 0.1%.
The French National Library does, and actually Stanford makes freely available the highest resolutions[0] which are otherwise sold 25€ or 50€ by the BnF (which also sells, more legitimately in my opinion, high-quality physical prints for reasonable prices).
Standford is using these in a commercial manner, and is also a commercial organisation.
"If you use content for general research, even if not for any specific purpose, and you or your organisation generates income, that counts as commercial use. So does using content for pro-bono work (from the Latin pro bono publico, meaning 'for the public good', or working for free), if it also enhances your reputation or leads to income-generating work in any way whatsoever."
Why was Stanford given permission where as no permission has been given to all French citizens?
Well, the BnF might not consider Stanford's usage as commercial, especially since they say it's a "collaboration".
Besides, as mentioned on the BnF website, the law allows public administration to charge for license or usage, regardless of commercial or not, of material they have collected, produced or provided at cost, as long as it doesn't make a profit[0].
I still think individuals should obviously have free access to it (citizens or not), but I don't see the current situation as as outrageous as you want to make it, and definitely not as abuse from the upper class (which is very real, in other domains).
Not even the members of the Mountain, the last left wing (and most extreme) political coalition before the authoritarian left wing took over, were against commerce itself.
When the various revolutionary governments were managing government lands seized from the church, they didn't just open them up all French citizens, they sold them off to fund the war they started.
So for fun, let's say they're assertion is legally valid, that the scans (not the original images) are copyrightable. What stops me from then taking screen caps of all their images, or copying the framebuffer from my graphics card or something (effectively "scans") and copyrighting those?
Some countries like the UK have a "Sweat of the Brow" [0] doctrine which lets them claim copyright by virtue of the effort put in to compile the work. However it isn't recognized in the U.S because they doesn't see this as requiring creativity so it doesn't count as a derivative work. This has the benefit that companies can't circumvent the public domain without altering the work, but it also disincentives them from digitizing older works. I don't know if french law acknowledges the doctrine or not. Regardless it is pretty unbecoming of a project started by government archivists and headed by a national library, though I do understand that they might want to recoup some of their costs.
But the site with the reproductions is hosted[1] in the USA[2], right? If so, then one could conclude that there is no copyright on the digital reproductions.
I think the copyright notice at the bottom is just website boilerplate. it's also on the main Stanford library website. The about page says "For commercial use, contact: utilisation.commerciale@bnf.fr", so it is the Bibliothèque nationale de France that is claiming copyright. IANAL, but I think you'd be pretty safe using those images on servers hosted in the USA because then you'd be under the jurisdiction of U.S copyright law, but things can get messy as in this case where a British Museum threatened to take the Wikimedia Foundation to UK court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Portrait_Gallery_and_....
The original image might be out of copyright, but someone's photograph of it is not.
So, if you can take your own image you can do what you want with it, but you don't have any right to someone else's photograph of it.
As it reminds us that the pursuit of scientific knowledge can often distract brilliant people from addressing social problems. I wonder if the glut of research scientists is one of the mechanisms by which the status quo is preserved.
I am not convinced scientists' role should be to address social problems. Beside since we are talking about France, most of the scientists that were politically engaged were Stalinists.
Your comment shows a profound misunderstanding of History, as Stalin was born 90 years after the French Revolution (and Karl Marx 30 years). Even while Stalin was alive, few if any French scientists were Stalinists, as by the time he rose to power France was diplomatically closer to the US than they were to the USSR.
During the Revolution, and preceding it, it turns out that many scientists were involved or even instrumental in the social progress that occurred. The simple act of imposing the metric system was meant as a way to eradicate the imperial in "imperial system". The Enlightenment caused the rise of many ideas of equality that can be said to have triggered the Revolution.
Of course, the extremes of the Terror also caused some scientists that were not deemed invested enough to lose their head, such as Lavoisier, the man that proved the conservation of mass. It should be noted that the government apologised a year or so later.
Stalinism is defined by policies of state terror, state centralization, purging the government and maintaining a cult of personality. Those are pretty extreme positions to hold.
Historically, many of Stalin's actions were not seen keenly in France, including Stalin's Gulags, his pact with Hitler, and over the cold war, his territorial aggressivity over the USSR's satellite countries. You may note that France was very decidedly on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
There definitely were quite a few socialists, there were a few communists, there probably were few Leninists, but I doubt there were any Stalinists. I'd be interested in the scientist's name if you found one.
The communist party was the largest political party in France after the war and it was fully and openly aligned to Moscow. You may (and should) interpret being a stalinist as a bad thing today but it wasn't at that time for a large portion of the left.
But my point is rather that being good at math and at creating mathematical representations of nature doesn't qualify someone to make decisions on how other people should live their life.
Please change 14k to 14,000 (value vs quantity). Although I should have been smart enough to realize that the latter could not exist, it may be better to state it empirically without getting people's hope's up. :)
I also assumed they were super high resolution scans. I'm guessing the submitter needed to shorten the title and unfortunately picked 14000 => 14k instead of say removing "released online" or even just "online". Hopefully dang will see this soon enough ;).
