On 20/07/2009, Durova <nadezhda.durova(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Indirectly this helps our position with regard to NPG,
because a significant
part of NPG's argument is that WMF is impossible to work with. Each time we
develop a cooperative relationship with another cultural institution we
prove that part of NPG's argument empirically wrong. The more this happens,
the more likely NPG is to look silly; the net effect could soften their
approach. Now is an excellent time to build those relationships because the
current situation is drawing attention to the media side of Wikipedia.
I think there is another side of this though; whether NPG are silly or
not, the uploader ran an automated program to systematically rip their
site of high resolution images.
That's certainly pretty unfriendly; it's pretty clear that the NPG
didn't want people to use their website's resources for that purpose.
When you extract from a server an entire set of information that they
don't want you to have that's essentially 'hacking', it's clear to me
that in a pretty real sense the uploader hacked into their website.
In other words, this isn't necessarily simply about copyright.
-Durova
--
-Ian Woollard
"All the world's a stage... but you'll grow out of it eventually."