2009/3/30 Stan Shebs <stanshebs@earthlink.net>

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

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