On 09/10/2007, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 09/10/2007, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
The fact that Wikipedia (at least en:wp) is pretty much mainstream - news stories now tend to be about something happening on Wikipedia, rather than the mere dancing-bear fact of its existence - actually works for us to a great extent. "Release your stuff! If you hate Wikipedia, it's still available for Citizendium." etc.
Those stories are still in the IT/technology section.
Or the educational section. Or, in the Guardian, the main editorial.
This is why getting those people to think of releasing material as proper free content (rather than free-as-in-beer, the equivalent of CC-by-nc-nd) would be such a win. Corruption from within with the FREE virus!
This involves getting the average person to think about copyright. Not really going to work.
I was talking about the culture industries. Turning them around will involve exploding many, many heads, one by one ...
Getting them to help with access to PD stuff is more reasonable but well lets have a look at some of the traditional groups: Local Libraries. Getting better more of them have scanners. But then they put them on a different floor to the archives. A start I suppose. The British library. Waste of time. Insist on doing any scanning themselves and charge a fortune. Imperial war museum. Same as the British library. British museum. If it is on display fine otherwise well. You might be able to take photos of some stuff in the reserve collect by appointment but anything else you have to pay them to take a photo which they release to you under a very limited license. National trust. If you want to take photos inside you have to contact the one person who appears to have permission to allow that and they don't appear to be set up to deal with anyone below the level of a film company. English Heritage helpful but a lot of the collections that would be useful appear to have been broken up and spread around the country. The owners of Conditionally Exempt Works of Art only have to allow viewing not photography: http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/heritage/rights.htm University libraries vary.
Yeah. We're attempting to turn around a whole way of thinking here. Which is why I think getting publicists to think that properly free-licensed content is normal for any purpose whatsoever would be a major win.
- d.