Voynich Authorship

[Mark Knowles]

a quick google gives the basics for archive permissions:

There is considerable variation in the form and contents of the rights information provided by archives and libraries, and it is not always clear who owns the rights to material. Archives do not automatically own the copyright of material in their holdings.
Donors or sellers can retain the rights for material, or they may not own the copyright of all the items they transfer to an archive.
For example, a donor may not own the copyright to letters written to them, or they may have transferred the rights to someone else, such as a publisher

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And from Kings College London  "Physical vs. Intellectual Property"
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My understanding is that normal copyright doesn't ever last much more than 100 years. In this case we are dealing with documents that are roughly 600 years old, so should not, I would have thought, be governed by normal copyright law. I think their restrictions are for reproduction of images of original documents. So I imagine if I were to get a photoreproduction of a letter from an archive and I made the text of that letter public, by retyping it, but not the image of the letter that would be OK. Obvious with enciphered letters and cipher keys reproducing them manually is quite a lot of work given in particular the widespread use of invented symbols in some case and even the size of them. The DECODE database who I have assisted a lot, started to manually transcribe ciphers, but are now working on an automatic transcription scheme. Once/if they get their system up and running a lot of the ciphers I have located will be found there albeit in transcribed form.