[Foundation-l] National Portrait Gallery

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 6:29 PM, David Gerard<dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/7/17 Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell at gmail.com>:
>
>> (*) Would not make the Wikimedia Foundation or its community of user
>> appear to endorse or support the assertion of copyright on exacting
>> reproductions of clearly public domain works. Wikimedia (as far as I
>> can tell) and many of its users believes that it would be a
>> significant harm to the public and a blow to the fundamental nature of
>> copyright if that kind of loophole were allowed to exist.
>
>
> I can imagine an NPG copyright tag that carefully states their claims
> without endorsing them:
>
> "This image is public domain in the US, as a plain reproduction of a
> public domain work. The National Portrait Gallery asserts copyright
> over this scan in the UK and licenses said scan under [copyleft
> licence]."
>
> That would pass muster for Commons just fine, though many would be
> annoyed and consider it was a sellout not to push the public domain
> question.

It would probably have to go as far as the full NPOV  "but
X-Y-Z-respectable-notable-parties think this is would be a ruinous
perversion of copyright, and not true even in the UK."

(Consider: The Wikimedia communities are generally pretty diligent
about actually following copyright, in my experience even more so than
many commercial organizations much less online communities. Our
communities will even behave more strictly than is required by law if
we see some greater social purpose. Collectively we've taken the
position we have because we have reason to believe the claims are both
invalid and are socially harmful.)

It's a pretty broad and complicated matter with ramifications far
outside this particular instance.  I surely don't want people coming
back and telling me that slavish reproductions of PD art are
copyrightable in the UK according to Wikipedia. Nor will the NPG want
people claiming Wikipedia says their claims are bunk.

Perhaps we can work out a scrupulously neutral statement which will
satisfy both parties.  I doubt this will happen unless both parties
feel like they MUST come to an agreement.  At it stands I think think
that it's clear that agreement must actually be reached.


As far as the sellout thing goes— consider that we already avoid
accepting a lot of 'fair use' that we could legally get away with in
the interest of expanding the base of of freely licensed works.
You're point about copyleft is a good one though,  generally a
copyleft grant would completely satisfy our user community (as well as
the foundation's formally stated mission).  (There are more than a few
things which are probably PD which we allow folks to assert copyleft
licenses over; some of *my* SVGs probably fall into that bucket)

But has this gotten so much attention that even that wouldn't be
enough?  I think probably so.  Moreover, it's not clear enough that we
could honestly negotiate it.  I.e. the NPG could agree to it, but if
the wider community doesn't like the arrangement and creates a lot of
noise everyone involved would look like fools.   Though, I'm prone to
being too cynical at times.

We've seemed to have had reasonably good luck elsewhere getting access
to public domain art unencumbered by special requirements. We'd be
short-sighted if we accept an unreasonably conciliatory compromise in
this one case.  I think we need to negotiate with the full expectation
that whatever we permit here may be demanded in all future cases, even
by non-museums, and even by those who would have previously asked for
no special treatment.  (Again, this is why the copyleft point is
interesting— as we already accept copylefted works, I just have no
clue how to reconcile it with the enormous amount of attention this
has had so far plus the desire to not accept the validity of
magically-not-PD trick)


On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 6:49 PM, Thomas Dalton<thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> What does Bridgeman vs. Corel have to do with it? We're talking about
> a UK legal threat.

I think Geni is making a cat's out of the bag argument. Regardless of
the degree of validity of the claim in the UK  a completely reasonable
response to UK civil action against someone in the US is "Good luck
collecting on that!".

A lot of people already have these images already.

Getting clearly illegal content off the internet is already almost
impossible. But something that appears to be clearly legal, in the US
of all places,?  Good luck with that.