Rules pertaining to the usage of MSS

[Guest guest]

I believe the owner of the manuscript has the right to prevent

publication of it if desired. Usually there will be some sort of notice

of the institution's policies in the forms one fills out to get the mss

copied, or in the correspondence. You might poke around on the homepage

of the U.S. Copyright Office, in my own institution the Library of

Congress. This is primarily directed towards practical use of the US

copyright law, but has material on the two major international copyright

conventions, and the draft international convention on intellectual

property. The URL is http://www.loc.gov/copyright/. In addition it is

possible that the Global Legal Information Network (GLIN)

<http://lcweb2.loc.gov/law/GLINv1/GLIN.html> has information on the

copyright law of the institution you dealt with.

 

I would suspect that having allowed copying or access to a ms, an

institution could not then prevent your using the readings in a critical

ed. including the readings of other mss, or the "fair use" citation of

passages from the mss as long as they did not amount to printing and

thereby publishing a work or a significant section of it. But I could

easily be wrong in this; pray don't take any action on it.

 

I have found a couple of works on the legal aspects of this issue, both

published in the US. I will post them to the list in a second message.

I think that in America the standard guides to scholarly research and

publishing discuss these issues. Perhaps they are discussed in similar

guides published in the country housing the institutions whose mss you

are using. Also, if you plan publishing your results in a book your

publisher should know, or know how to find out.

 

Sincerely,

 

Allen Thrasher

Southern Asia Section

Library of Congress