On 01/04/2009, at 8:55, geni <geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote:
2009/3/31 Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com>om>:
Hoi,
The Romans and whoever in 1709 did not have photography nor did
they have
Internet. The practice of considering digital re-use is definitely
a recent
invention. Our current best practices were not in place until
recently. The
notion that this can be expected of our recent past is interesting
to say
the least it is not realistic.
It's the same legal concepts.
That is disengenuius. To say that the Romans and
we have "the same
legal concepts" of copyright is as relevant as saying that [[Galen]]
and us have the same concepts of medecine! They are our origins but
completely irrelevant to our practical discussions now.
The notion that a commissioned work means a
transfer of copyright
is not
necessarily right. This has been considered in court in several
countries
and this is not necessarily how it can be safely understood.
Commissioned works thing can be messy yes but that is nothing new.
Superboy for example.
There are
collections that have been given to museums and archives with the
express
understanding that the works would be preserved. Current best
practice has
it that part of such preservation is the digitisation and the
publication on
the Internet.
When we cooperate with museums and archives in this, we will find
that it is
extremely unlikely to get problems with their material.
That entirely misses the point.
Best practice in preservation does now involve
digitizarion but it
does not *necessarily* mean placing that digisation on the Internet. I
believe geni's point is that our concern is copyright status rather
than preservation practice.
There are all kinds
of measures that can be taken to lessen the impact of an unlikely
copyright
holder to object. One of them is the release only in a low
resolution.
Either a work is free in which case we go for the highest resolution
possible or it is unfree and not our concern.
You are both right. We are making
Commons in a way that people can be
black/white about their ability to use it's content. However in
practice copyright is simply not black and white - no matter how easy
it is to talk about death dates of the Author etc. If we hope to build
relationships with cultural institutions for the long term it is
simply not productive to say to them "we only take things that you
have specific release forms for and give us your highest resolution".
Museums will often work with us if we don't make absolutist demands
about image resolution for example. That eat, in a year or two we can
return to them and demonstrate qualitatively and quantitatively our
value and *then* ask for a higher resolution. Showing them our
features pictures (and their pageview stats) is another good way of
doing this.
I don't agree with using Commons on a seemingly 'temporary' basis -
use it till someone complains. In practice we can delete images but it
wouldnt be a good thing to be relying on that. In practice whem
dealing with museums do like this fact as it fives them aome
assuramces we have systems in place. If the museum is willing to place
the images on flickr with the "no known copyright" tag, then we should
be welcoming of the files too.
> In some of the responses in this thread I find that people take a
> position
> where a museum or archive is the "opposition".
I find this often, and
many museums find us to be the enemy, so I
beleve it is up to us to make the gesture of friendship since we are
the 'new kids' and we have much to learn from them.
This may be
true for some
museums or archives, but in this context we are talking about
organisations
that want to partner with us. They want to partner with us because we
provide a platform that makes this material relevant again.
If it is unfree material making it relevant is a bit outside our
mandate.
I agree this is very true. But I don't necessarily agree it is unfree
material. As I said a while ago, museums are very hesitant to make a
legally binding statement of black/white copyright status. We should
be working with them to help them make that judgement.
There are many archives containing solidly free
material that
we do not yet have useful access to. Far better to focus on those.
-Liam
[[witty lama]]
--
geni
_______________________________________________
Commons-l mailing list
Commons-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l