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Re: second-hand ownership



Under U.S. copyright law, these documents went into the public domain as of the end of 2002. But I know nothing about Israeli copyright law, so cannot comment on their status in Israel.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


Dear Kevin, Pippa, Linda and Sandy:

Yes, my (with a co-author from Chile) paper was about Sir Isaac Newton's universal calendar and was published by Notes and Records of the Royal Society in 59 (3) Sept 2005 issue. We made a transcript of several Newton's handwritings and displayed several pages of his computations. [Of course our main goal was analysis of Newton's text and the statistical method behind his computations.]

These documents from Jerusalem were never published previously. They were bequested by someone A. Sh. Yahuda to JNUL in 1951 and after prolonged court proceedings initiated by his family still reached Jerusalem in 1969. It is my understnading that JNUL owns complete rights to these papers. (Yahuda himself bought them at Sotheby's 1936 or immediately after).

This was an agreement between me and JNUL - below:

................................................................................
May 10, 2005

Dr. Ari Belenkiy
Mathematics Department
Bar-Ilan University
Ramat Gan 52900

Dear Dr. Belenkiy,

We hereby give you permission to reproduce the images of four pages
of Newton's manuscripts from the Jewish National and University
Library's Newton Papers 24 for your article, which will appear in
the Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London. Appropriate
credit should be given to the JNUL.

Yours sincerely,

Rivka Plesser
Director
Department of Manuscripts and Archives
.................................................................


Let me note that the manuscripts are known among Newton scholars as
"Yahuda mns" but JNUL probably prefers name "Newton" by obvious
reasons.

I do remember that I signed a standard agreement with NRRS giving
them all the rights where was a provision that all issues involving
the reproduction of documents I had to resolve with the owners on my
own.

While JNUL's depury director (Mrs R. Duke) already contacted me
after my query to this list I am still interested to find out what
are the legal issues involved.

I am also a bit distrurbed by her language - "for commercial use" -
since our publication did not have any commercial targets except for
the obvious "academic status" issues involved.

Thanks again to everyone who has already responded.

Ari Belenkiy