History questions not worth their own thread

[say1988]

Copying from Padma:
First disclaimer: I Am Not A Lawyer.
Second disclaimer: Copyright law details vary between different countries.

So do you mean that if I buy, let's say, collction of Shakespeare's plays in English, which has been published a year ago, I can scan that specific book and put it in the internet, if I omit foreword &c?

In theory, that should be true. If you don't include new content there should be no copyright problems. There are various exceptions (i.e. in the UK, the Crown holds a perpetual copyright on the King James Version of the Bible). In your case you would not only have to look at Finnish copyright law, but also the EU. But unless there is some major significance to teh work (i.e. the KJV above) it is unlikely that there should be a problem. You may also need to look at historic lengths. But if published in 1800, anything less that life +150 is almost certainly expired (and AFAIK +100 is the longest current one. The other question may reside with organizations, I am not sure how they are treated (as they can "live" for hundreds of years).

 

[Dachs]

Doesn't editing out some of the old content count as new content?

 

[Padma]

Doesn't editing out some of the old content count as new content?

"Editorial" content, whether that involves adding notes, comments, etc., or deleting words/passages, etc., is generally considered new content.

 

[Atticus]

Ok, thanks everybody! I though there would be some kind of international agreements on these things, people often talk like there were. But I guess there's at least some kind of correlation, and of course I'm not going to do anything at least on large scale before consulting local law.

 

[Padma]

The Berne Convention is the key international agreement. It basically says that nations must respect each other's copyright laws. All major countries (including the US, EU countries, Russia, etc.) are signatories.

 

[LightSpectra]

How much did Frederick II's francophilia affect Prussian culture at the time, compared to Viennese fashions in the era?

 

[innonimatu]

Perhaps my problem is more clear, if I try not to tell it in general form, so the reason I'm asking this is that I've been searching books on a certain subject, and found out that they can be really hard to find. However the internet has proven out to be very helpful on this matter, and I'll have to take back some bad words I've said about it's limitations. For example there's not a single copy in Finnish libraries of a book I need, and Amazon search gave one copy from around 1800 that would have costed about $1200. I managed to find it scanned on a netpage, but it was 1000 jpg-files of which you have no preview, you can only type in the page number or click "previous" or "next". So I though I might download these photos, and create a pdf out of them. And as I want to help others who might be interested, I'd like to put that pdf in circulation.

IF the text and the edition is from as far 19th century, you are absolutely free to copy and public the text unhindered by any copyright. In any country, I believe, even those with very lengthy copyright periods. But do not simply make the pdf from the .jpg images, some countries might very well have laws stupid enough to "protect" those images with copyright too. Use some character recognition software and extract the text. It'll also become more user-friendly.
And you might then thing of contributing it to the Gutenberg project, or any other such repository.

 

[duckduckswan]

Say they had the naval power to do so, what would have been the outcome if the Germans sent a fleet to attack the supply line extending to the Allie's D-Day invasion beach head(s)? Would a strong enough force been enough to sever all ties to the continent and leave thousands of Allied soldiers stranded?

 

[say1988]

Would a strong enough force been enough to sever all ties to the continent and leave thousands of Allied soldiers stranded?

If it is strong enough, it would be enough. There was no way to air supply them for long. The Allied forces would have been crippled days into a blockade (fuel, food, and munitions were all needed in vast quantities).
The Allied invasion force would have been wiped out, best case scenario a large portion could be evacuated by concentrating on a small portion of the beachhead and a bunch more join the resistance.

But if they could have done that there would have been no D-Day, and they would have had to control a significantly larger fleet in 1940 (can only build so many ships), which likely would have made Sealion viable. Not to mention supporting Italy in the Med, or stopping Dunkirk and other evacuations from France. All in all, if the Germans controlled, and could operate (fuel requirements for such a fleet would be enormous), a fleet capable of challenging the Anglo-American naval forces there was a lot more to worry about than the men in Normandy.

 

[Dachs]

How much did Frederick II's francophilia affect Prussian culture at the time, compared to Viennese fashions in the era?

"Prussian culture" being a wonderfully vague thing to refer to, your question is kinda like asking how much Obama's basketball playing has affected American culture. And Friedrich's 'Francophilia' was hardly constant, consistent, or evenly applied even in his own life...

So: not all that much, outside Sanssouci.

 

[LightSpectra]

"Prussian culture" being a wonderfully vague thing to refer to, your question is kinda like asking how much Obama's basketball playing has affected American culture.

Yes, I suppose it is a similar question. Though the fact that 18th century Prussian culture wasn't so well established as modern American is, and that a king has more influence on his nation than a president does makes it a less silly question. I guess. Whatever.

 

[Lord Baal]

If it is strong enough, it would be enough. There was no way to air supply them for long. The Allied forces would have been crippled days into a blockade (fuel, food, and munitions were all needed in vast quantities).
The Allied invasion force would have been wiped out, best case scenario a large portion could be evacuated by concentrating on a small portion of the beachhead and a bunch more join the resistance.

But if they could have done that there would have been no D-Day, and they would have had to control a significantly larger fleet in 1940 (can only build so many ships), which likely would have made Sealion viable. Not to mention supporting Italy in the Med, or stopping Dunkirk and other evacuations from France. All in all, if the Germans controlled, and could operate (fuel requirements for such a fleet would be enormous), a fleet capable of challenging the Anglo-American naval forces there was a lot more to worry about than the men in Normandy.

Pretty much this. If Germany had a navy strong enough to challenge Anglo-American domination of the Channel, then Normandy is the least of Britain's problems.

 

[Atticus]

Use some character recognition software and extract the text. It'll also become more user-friendly.
And you might then thing of contributing it to the Gutenberg project, or any other such repository.

Good idea! The text section of archive.org is also a good place to find old books.

 

[LightSpectra]

Did the Habsburgs ever use the title "Austrian Emperor" (Österreichischekaiser) as opposed to "Emperor of Austria" (Kaiser von Österreich), particular around the 1848 period?

 

[Dachs]

I am almost certain that they did not.

 

[LightSpectra]

I am almost certain that they did not.

I see; then was that because they still felt that Austria had a "primacy" among the lands in the Habsburg dominion, or was it simply because the legitimacy of the crown rests in the fact that Vienna had authority over its empire?

 

[ParkCungHee]

It is the very opposite of Austria being the principle of their territories. It is because royal titles are separable and unrelated.


If Henry VIII is King of England, France and Ireland, he is not the English King, who happens to rule these other territories, but very much the King of Ireland, the King of France, and the King of England combined in a single personage. So it would not do for them to be "The Austrian Emperor" (especially due to the international nature of European Monarchy) but "The Emperor of Austria." Nice and standardized that way also.

 

[Dachs]

I have heard it asserted that the Russian Empire in the First World War wasn't suffering from any economic crisis that the rest of the combatants weren't, but that its problems were mostly bureaucratic in nature. Stuff like, while all of the states involved were having shell shortages, the Germans, in their Gorlice-Tarnow offensive in 1915, captured a million (!) artillery shells stocked at the Russian fortress of Novogeorgievsk alone. Apparently there's an argument that a part of the Russian problem was that their economy was expanding, and that they were having a crisis of growth, and inefficient bureaucracy and poor resource allocation screwed them over. And to me, that kind of makes sense. The proximate cause of the February Revolution, the whole Petrograd bread riot and International Women's Day stuff, was going on in other states too. Germany was having its Turnip Winter at the same time, complete with demonstrations and so forth, but the Reich didn't collapse. (Yet.) And it's difficult to imagine that a Russian economy running at war production for four years (during which it was theoretically in a "crisis" of some kind) then underwent the dislocation associated with the implementation of war communism (insofar as war communism was actually implemented anyway) and sustained a revolutionary war for another five years.

But I'm sure there's ample evidence to the contrary. Anybody well up on this whole debate? If it's even a debate anymore, one way or the other?

 

[ParkCungHee]

This and continuous Russian underestimation of what stuff required. There was poor record keeping, so they basically guessed how many of what they would need, both in short term and long term planning.

 

[BurnEmDown]

When were seconds and minutes invented?
I think hours were invented long ago with those "sun clocks", they made half a circle and cut it to 6 parts, each representing an hour, but no way they also knew about minutes and seconds back then.