The Cambridge University Library claims copyright on the images, however they do offer this license:
"Images made available for download are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License (CC BY-NC 3.0)"
So there's no reason why someone couldn't do exactly what you suggest. (Unfortunately, the images you can download seem to be much lower resolution than the ones they're hosting.)
this is very interesting but I have a question, while the originals can't be under copyright, do the scans have a different copyright as kind of a derived work?
I thought that derivative copyrights only applied to work that required intellectual effort, such as a translation (for a book) or reinterpretation (for a song). The physical act of scanning doesn't seem like it should count.
Scanning ancient documents can be anything but trivial, and frequently more involved than simply placing paper/ parchment/ vellum/ etc on a glass plate. They usually need to be handled very carefully with mesh gloves, not compressed or folded , and likely not exposed to overly bright light to avoid fading the ink. The USA founding documents, which are over 100 years newer by comparison, are encased in inert gas and hidden from bright lights for preservation.
Newton's written notes may have required even greater care, which one could possibly argue would constitute unique intellectual effort.
Copyright does not protect "unique intellectual effort"; or at least that is not what it's for primarily. It protects the particular presentation of a creative work.
IMO copyright should not be granted on 'mechanical' reproductions no matter how much sweat is produced on how many brows.
Would Cambridge Uni really not digitise it's manuscript collection if they could not directly commercialise it?
You don't copyright from storing someone's work. Scanning is a point-and-click affair, as I discovered while copying pages from some early Aldine editions last summer.
Probably not, unless significant non-mechanical enhancement was performed, in which case maybe, and maybe differs between UK law and law elsewhere (and if you aren't yourself in the UK, how your local law interacts with the law in the country of the work's origin is another source of uncertainty). Here's the guidelines page Wikimedia Commons uses: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:When_to_use_the_PD...
