Re: second-hand ownership

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

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