The British Library charges extra if you want to reprint or republish pages from their out-of-copyright books and manuscripts. They also assert new copyrights when they photograph or microfilm things.
Greg is right. I am writing a book on the history of the southwest corner of modern China and saw an exhibition in the British Museum of British Library held historical copperplate prints produced in France for a Chinese emperor in the Ming Dynasty of his campaigns in the area (eg. the spectacular tropical/karst landscape pacification of Annam, or modern day north Vietnam). There are about 5 of these things I'm interested in, and the bastards wanted ~500GBP per image to photograph them for me for research purposes, with an explicitly threatening legal statement that this would grant no republishing rights. I mean, come on! Talk about holding the world's heritage hostage!
PS. I believe they obtained the pieces by invading Beijing... on the then Qing dynasty government's ever-so-serious provocation of refusing to issue free trading rights to foreign nations, in England's case mostly to distribute vast quantities of cut-rate opium produced in slave-like conditions by its Indian subjects to the Chinese population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War
