brainwagon

Wow, this site contains a huge number of works by Charles Darwin. 50,000 pages of searchable text. 40,000 pages of images. Lots more to come. A fantastic resource in the history of science.

The complete work of Charles Darwin

[tags]Charles Darwin,Evolution[/tags]

Two sad things somewhat spoil this collection for me:

• There is a dubious assertion of copyright over most of the materials in this collection along with restrictions for their use. Such an assertion of copyright is almost certainly meaningless, since the works are themselves in the public domain, and the courts have held that the mere transcription of public domain works by scanning or copying does not represent a significant creative work that is worthy of copyright. They can, of course, assert a “collection” copyright on the set of work as a whole, but the fact that they would try this subterfuge to restrict access to public domain materials is annoying.
• All the links to the audio files seem broken. (Incidently, these likely do qualify as creative works, as they are read and performed by humans, which can arguably be called a creative act.)< /s> Well, the audio is back. It’s computer generated audio, which I find enormously tiresome to listen to. Ignore what I said about it being copyrightable.