Hi all,
I've just received a letter from the French Minister of Culture thanking
Wikimedia France for its participation in hearings conducted in 2008
concerning the Ministry's policy on the digital usage of cultural public
data (e.g. museum photographs), with a copy of the report resulting from
these hearings. The Minister indicates that the proposals in these
reports are to become guidelines for all administrations within his
jurisdiction.
Legally speaking, the topic is fairly complicated: government services
have to respect authors' rights, competition law, European law, and so
on. In many cases, the public organizations who administer a database of
e.g. pictures do not hold the copyright to these pictures and thus are
unable to grant licenses.
Interestingly, several of the analyzes that I proposed to the commission
made their way into the report, which is probably the sign that we were
not the only ones who voiced them. For instance, the report mentions
that the current policies are incoherent across administrations, and
that many smaller public organizations (e.g. museums) simply lack the
infrastructure and competence (e.g. in legal issues) to properly
administer content licensing issues. It also recognizes that effective
visibility online passes by participation in the major sites that
Internet users consult (Google, Wikipedia, etc.).
The report also advocates that non commercial usage should not incur
royalties, that click-through licenses should be used on public sites to
effectively inform the end user, that a small set of licenses should be
used, and that cost-free licenses should be used as much as possible.
A whole section of the report discusses usages on sites such as
Wikipedia. The report underlines the fact that certain aspects of the
free licenses used on those sites may contradict certain points of
French law regarding authors' rights. The report advocates some
"negociation" regarding release of content to these sites (e.g.: reduced
resolution for these sites, while keeping high-resolution pictures under
unfree, commercial terms). "Creative commons" licenses are mentioned by
name.
I advocate participants to this list to refrain from passing hasty
judgments on these issues (remember, this list is publicly archived). In
particular, they cannot "just make everything public domain as does the
US government", at least in the near future, because there are a number
of legal difficulties that cannot be quickly eliminated. It is for
instance often the case that public institutions do not hold the full
copyright for the contents that they host; also, in some cases,
commercial providers of digitized content could sue public institutions
for unfair competition if they adopted "better" licensing terms; etc.
-- DM