Re: second-hand ownership

["Ari Belenkiy" <belenka@mail.biu.ac.il>]

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