British Library and Copyright

The following caught my interest from the BL blog:

“Readers may be surprised to learn that most medieval manuscripts held at the British Library are still in copyright until 2039 under the 1988 Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (as amended). However for unpublished material created many centuries ago and in the public domain in most other countries, the British Library believes making available digital copies of this material to be very unlikely to raise any objections. As an institution whose role it is to support access to knowledge, we have therefore taken the decision to release certain digitised images technically still in copyright in the UK under the Public Domain Mark on our Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts website.”

I like their self-understanding as ‘an institution whose role it is to support access to knowledge’. Wouldn't it be great if all scholars thought about themselves in similar terms ...