Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Hoi.
I am talking to a few museums and archives and several of them are
interested in considering Commons for their collection. At the same
time they are also considering Flickr.
The issue they have with Commons is its restrictions. One of the
museums said it like this: "We have done our best to ascertain the
copyright status of much of our material. We have not been able to
find the original copyright holder or someone who inherited these
rights. When we post our material to Flickr, we just remove the
material when a copyright holder turns up and asks us to. Doing it in
any other way requires much more effort. Effort that we rather spend
in more productive endeavours like digitising and annotating."
Flickr is what
they want then. We can hardly insist that random
uploaders must supply copyright holders, licenses, etc, and then make an
exception for an institution just because they say they "tried really
hard". How many times do we see an uploader say "I couldn't find a
copyright holder", then somebody knowledgeable takes 10 seconds to
locate a copy with complete documentation showing that it's very much
non-free. No museum's holdings are worth so much to me that I'm willing
to cast doubts over the legal status of everything else in Commons.
Stan