I frankly always assumed that most museums refuse to allow photos for two reasons; and nothing to do with copyrights: a.- Many years ago (most of you would not recall, flash photography required magnesium filament containing flashbulbs, which presented a fire hazard, and or could be ejected by a spring mechanism from cameras, and cause potential damage; and these were the origin of the ban; Now that no one uses these dangerous things anymore they needed an excuse to continue the ban so they claim that flashes can "fade the art". (Don't know the truth of that). b.- I think it's far more because they get to sell the postcards at the book store of their exhibits and CHARGE for them, and your photos are free. I suspect this is really about the almighty buck then rights. -SJP _____ From: wikimedia_nyc-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikimedia_nyc-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Lee Gillentine Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2011 10:23 AM To: New York City Wikimedians Subject: Re: [Wikimedia NYC] Free-culture-compliant GLAM awards was: Museum of Art and Design lifts photo ban I like that idea. Personally, I think patrons taking photos in museums is annoying, and I can understand the reasons why museums would have a restrictive photo policy. So an important thing to add to the criteria of rating museum's "free-culture-compliance" is the availability of images of items in their collections through some type of creative-commons license. This, of course, can be weighted differently than actually being able to take photos inside the museum. -Lee On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 11:46 PM, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt(a)gmail.com> wrote: (referring to previous thread: Yes, as several people have described, Wikimedia takes assiduous care about copyright but cannot be responsible for contracts (formal or implied) between third-parties e.g. a museum and its patrons.) Continuing from the link that Sammy posted, http://hyperallergic.com/photopolicy/ this has got me wondering if it really is viable to create a museum photography policy list... but much more than that... I think this could work globally, but first I'd like to see if it works in one area and I think that New York is as perfect a place as could be found for such a trial. What I'm thinking is whether it would be a good idea for Wikimedia to sponsor the creating of a "free-culture-compliant" rating schema for cultural organisations. If it worked properly, it could be updated and "announced" annually with the best organisations in different categories (National/less than 5 employees/libraries...) winning some kind of recognition/award. Where I'm basing this off is Greenpeace's "Guide to Greener Electronics" which has been running for several years now: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/toxics/electronics/Guid e-to-Greener-Electronics/ The deal with this is to take the public statements/policies of the major tech organisations and rate them against a set of objective criteria. Each year the new edition produces quite a bit of publicity e.g. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/oct/27/apple-greenpeace-greener-e lectronics-rankings Why I like this system is that it only assesses publicly stated policies which means it does not require a complicated/expensive assessment system or checking compliance with those policies. Also, by reducing things to a score it makes it easy to rate the companies which allows for simple reporting phrases (that the newspapers and corporate management like) such as "Nokia stays in 1st place with the same score of 7.5 [green]". Now, imagine if we could produce an objective list of "free-culture criteria" that are applicable to cultural organisations (including but not limited to photographic policies) and give each criterion a weighting. We could make the list and the assessment process public, as is the wiki way, which would also enable other organisations to self-assess if they wanted to (something that cannot be done with Greenpeace's closed system). Then, once an assessment had been done on all the institutions, we would be in the position to be able to make a press release saying (for example): "in 2011 The Brooklyn museum is the most free cultural institution in New York, with the Tenement museum being the most improved whist the Frick Collection became less free over the same period." This also allows smaller institutions to be able to "beat" the big guys at something for the first time! What do you think of the idea in general? What do you think of the idea specifically for NYC in 2011? And...before you think I'm just trying ask you to do work, I should point out that the WMF has recently hired me on a 1 year fellowship (not yet announced) to improve our GLAM outreach/collaboration capacity and therefore I would definitely be up for helping to do the hard work on such a project. Sincerely, -Liam / Witty lama wittylama.com/blog Peace, love & metadata _______________________________________________ Wikimedia_NYC mailing list Wikimedia_NYC(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia_nyc

I agree completely. In fact, I would weight "freely shares their own images of PD works" and "releases their own IP under a CC license" much more highly than "allows photography from the public". What are the other criteria (beyond photographic policy) that we we would expect to see in a GLAM that was "free-culture compliant"? -Liam Hmm ... I'd like to see at least some of the collection available online already, and rate them for the quality of the free images (i.e., higher resolutions would get a better score). Also, losing points for any action taken against existing unauthorized photos. Daniel Case

Has anyone taken this discussion to Wiki Commons? If not, the Village Pump might be a good place to introduce it, and to get a wider discussion. Malcolm --- On Thu, 1/6/11, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt(a)gmail.com> wrote: From: Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt(a)gmail.com> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia NYC] Free-culture-compliant GLAM awards was: Museum of Art and Design lifts photo ban To: "New York City Wikimedians" <wikimedia_nyc(a)lists.wikimedia.org> Cc: "Mathias Schindler" <mathias.schindler(a)gmail.com> Date: Thursday, January 6, 2011, 9:35 PM I agree completely. In fact, I would weight "freely shares their own images of PD works" and "releases their own IP under a CC license" much more highly than "allows photography from the public". What are the other criteria (beyond photographic policy) that we we would expect to see in a GLAM that was "free-culture compliant"? -Liam wittylama.com/blog Peace, love & metadata On 5 January 2011 15:22, Lee Gillentine <lgillentine(a)gmail.com> wrote: I like that idea. Personally, I think patrons taking photos in museums is annoying, and I can understand the reasons why museums would have a restrictive photo policy.  So an important thing to add to the criteria of rating museum's "free-culture-compliance"  is the availability of images of items in their collections through some type of creative-commons license.  This, of course, can be weighted differently than actually being able to take photos inside the museum.   -Lee On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 11:46 PM, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt(a)gmail.com> wrote: (referring to previous thread: Yes, as several people have described, Wikimedia takes assiduous care about copyright but cannot be responsible for contracts (formal or implied) between third-parties e.g. a museum and its patrons.) Continuing from the link that Sammy posted, http://hyperallergic.com/photopolicy/ this has got me wondering if it really is viable to create a museum photography policy list... but much more than that... I think this could work globally, but first I'd like to see if it works in one area and I think that New York is as perfect a place as could be found for such a trial. What I'm thinking is whether it would be a good idea for Wikimedia to sponsor the creating of a "free-culture-compliant" rating schema for cultural organisations. If it worked properly, it could be updated and "announced" annually with the best organisations in different categories (National/less than 5 employees/libraries...) winning some kind of recognition/award. Where I'm basing this off is Greenpeace's "Guide to Greener Electronics" which has been running for several years now: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/toxics/electronics/Gui… The deal with this is to take the public statements/policies of the major tech organisations and rate them against a set of objective criteria. Each year the new edition produces quite a bit of publicity e.g. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/oct/27/apple-greenpeace-greener-… Why I like this system is that it only assesses publicly stated policies which means it does not require a complicated/expensive assessment system or checking compliance with those policies. Also, by reducing things to a score it makes it easy to rate the companies which allows for simple reporting phrases (that the newspapers and corporate management like) such as "Nokia stays in 1st place with the same score of 7.5 [green]". Now, imagine if we could produce an objective list of "free-culture criteria" that are applicable to cultural organisations (including but not limited to photographic policies) and give each criterion a weighting. We could make the list and the assessment process public, as is the wiki way, which would also enable other organisations to self-assess if they wanted to (something that cannot be done with Greenpeace's closed system). Then, once an assessment had been done on all the institutions, we would be in the position to be able to make a press release saying (for example): "in 2011 The Brooklyn museum is the most free cultural institution in New York, with the Tenement museum being the most improved whist the Frick Collection became less free over the same period." This also allows smaller institutions to be able to "beat" the big guys at something for the first time! What do you think of the idea in general? What do you think of the idea specifically for NYC in 2011? And...before you think I'm just trying ask you to do work, I should point out that the WMF has recently hired me on a 1 year fellowship (not yet announced) to improve our GLAM outreach/collaboration capacity and therefore I would definitely be up for helping to do the hard work on such a project.  Sincerely, -Liam / Witty lama wittylama.com/blog Peace, love & metadata _______________________________________________ Wikimedia_NYC mailing list Wikimedia_NYC(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia_nyc _______________________________________________ Wikimedia_NYC mailing list Wikimedia_NYC(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia_nyc -----Inline Attachment Follows----- _______________________________________________ Wikimedia_NYC mailing list Wikimedia_NYC(a)lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia_nyc

I'm no curator or professional photographer, but I had the impression that one argument against photography in museums was the damage that frequent exposure to intense light could cause. I've always gotten the impression that that was less of an issue than they let on, more of an excuse to prevent competing quality photos of the work from being created so they can sell more postcards in the gift shop. Daniel Case

On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 3:56 PM, Pharos <pharosofalexandria(a)gmail.com> wrote: Well, I decided to start a page on meta as a lark: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Free_Culture_Index Thanks, Richard (User:Pharos)