Usually I prefer the carrot to the stick and take a very long view. For
instance, baseball player Babe Ruth had a career that crossed the PD-1923
threshold under US law, and most of the more famous part of that career
happened after 1923. Right now our featured picture of him is a restored
publicity photo from 1920.
This was featured in March and hasn't run on the main page yet. When it
does I intend to note the traffic statistics for main page views for that
day. One of the most powerful arguments we have to gain access to more
material under free license is to come to the people who control those
rights and show them how it benefits them.
As the examples collect this becomes very persuasive. This May, for
instance, ten of the images I restored from Library of Congress archives ran
as Picture of the Day; the main page received a total of over 58 million
page views while they were up. The New York Times has a circulation of 23
million a month, so each image that gets featured is receiving the
equivalent of front page attention on NYTimes every day for a solid week.
Copyright owners sit up and pay attention when they hear that.
They ought to be lining up for this opportunity. So far most of them don't
know it exists. We're working on building tangible examples and momentum.
The great thing is, institutional donors are proving willing to share large
numbers of images in return for a handful of showcase restorations. After
the NPG threat came out the Tropenmuseum of Amsterdam agreed to donate
100,000 images to Commons. Negotiations had been underway for a while but
the timing was serendipitous. We're negotiating further cooperation with
them and with other institutions that we hope to be able to announce soon.
-Durova
On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 10:07 AM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com>wrote;wrote:
You are right Durova. I apologise for sidetracking
things there.
Do you have views on how to address situations where we have a free
pictures of someone when they are very old, but all the pictures of
them when they were young (and famous) are copyrighted? This can
happen with sports stars and others. Does the presence of an arguably
less relevant free picture (of them when they are old) dissuade people
from attempting to get a free picture that may be more relevant to the
article (from when they were young)?
Carcharoth
On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 5:58 PM, Durova<nadezhda.durova(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Geni is right; professional photographers who own
an uncontroversial
copyright over an image are completely within their rights to relicense
and
upload a low resolution version. That's what
the Bundesarchiv did with
100,000 images last December.
It doesn't really facilitate those negotiations, either with
photographers
or with cooperative institutions, to sidestep
discussion about the
cooperative alternatives and refocus on one legal threat. This is our
opportunity to build upon Noam's article and create new synergistic
relationships; let's make the most of it.
-Durova
On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 9:51 AM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com
wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 5:06 PM, geni<geniice(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> > 2009/7/20 Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com>om>:
> >> It would be interesting to compare why low-resolution is considered
OK
> >> here, to support and encourage the
revenue stream of a professional
> >> photographer, but not in the case of the National Portrait Gallery
> >> (where the underlying works are public domain), and the revenue
stream
> is (in theory) supporting the digitisation costs.
>
Because the photographers copyright claim is legit. Under US law the
National Portrait Gallery's isn't.
Not copyright. Revenue stream.
Freedom. Not beer money.
Something being in the public domain doesn't mean you can't make money
out of it. The question is whether you are restricting access by
others to the originals. If the NPG gave people the option of either:
a) Buying our high-resolution images to fund our digitisation program
and our general cultural mission (because the government says we have
to generate some of our own funding).
Or:
b) Allowing access for professional scanners and photographers to
obtain scans to release under a free license.
What would the response be?
This strikes at the heart of why some people do react as if people are
stealing something from the NPG. In effect the NPG are restricting
access (and in a sense 'stealing' the public domain), and in another
sense, people are 'stealing' by piggybacking on the efforts of the NPG
who digitised the images. Ethics, here, not copyright.
The NPG almost certainly wouldn't agree to (b), but if they did, what
would the case be then? "Oh, we can't afford to pay for people to come
and scan the pictures, so we will just use the ones you've produced
instead." Or would Commons and the WMF organise a parallel scanning
effort that would duplicate what had already been done? Seems a waste
of time and resources, doesn't it? But when someone says "there is a
photograph here of something on public display, can we use it?", and
the answer is "no, the photograph is copyrighted, go and take your own
photograph", we see the same duplication of effort and resources.
Carcharoth
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