Hi all,

I've just received a letter from the French Minister of Culture thanking Wikimedia France for its participation in hearings conducted in 2008 concerning the Ministry's policy on the digital usage of cultural public data (e.g. museum photographs), with a copy of the report resulting from these hearings. The Minister indicates that the proposals in these reports are to become guidelines for all administrations within his jurisdiction.

Legally speaking, the topic is fairly complicated: government services have to respect authors' rights, competition law, European law, and so on. In many cases, the public organizations who administer a database of e.g. pictures do not hold the copyright to these pictures and thus are unable to grant licenses.

Interestingly, several of the analyzes that I proposed to the commission made their way into the report, which is probably the sign that we were not the only ones who voiced them. For instance, the report mentions that the current policies are incoherent across administrations, and that many smaller public organizations (e.g. museums) simply lack the infrastructure and competence (e.g. in legal issues) to properly administer content licensing issues. It also recognizes that effective visibility online passes by participation in the major sites that Internet users consult (Google, Wikipedia, etc.).

The report also advocates that non commercial usage should not incur royalties, that click-through licenses should be used on public sites to effectively inform the end user, that a small set of licenses should be used, and that cost-free licenses should be used as much as possible.

A whole section of the report discusses usages on sites such as Wikipedia. The report underlines the fact that certain aspects of the free licenses used on those sites may contradict certain points of French law regarding authors' rights. The report advocates some "negociation" regarding release of content to these sites (e.g.: reduced resolution for these sites, while keeping high-resolution pictures under unfree, commercial terms). "Creative commons" licenses are mentioned by name.

I advocate participants to this list to refrain from passing hasty judgments on these issues (remember, this list is publicly archived). In particular, they cannot "just make everything public domain as does the US government", at least in the near future, because there are a number of legal difficulties that cannot be quickly eliminated. It is for instance often the case that public institutions do not hold the full copyright for the contents that they host; also, in some cases, commercial providers of digitized content could sue public institutions for unfair competition if they adopted "better" licensing terms; etc.

-- DM