On 01/04/2009, at 8:55, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
2009/3/31 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:
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@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/commons-l