Does anything prevent Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co. from being a major spoiler for anyone attempting to keep too tight a grip on such digitizations?
A museum would certainly be well placed to keep a bunch of nerds with loads of scanning equipment out of the exhibit hall on assorted crowding/curatorial concern/etc. grounds; but (unlike a photograph, where it would be relatively easy to argue some sort of artistic intent in the composition) something specifically intended to be a faithful digitization would seem like it’d only be copyright worthy in ‘sweat of brow’ or ‘database rights’ jurisdictions.
That wouldn’t stop them from making access to the dataset require assenting to a giant contract that imposes all the restrictions and more that copyright would have; and it doesn’t necessarily cover any nice, cleaned-up, carefully manually massaged, data; but what leg would one have to stand on if a copy of the raw scan were to…make its way into the wild?
