Click-throughs are much lower, often on the level of 15,000-30,000 during
main page time. Yet remember these are also generating a steady stream of
attention on the articles themselves. The one amateur photo of a sound card
is receiving 2,000 direct page views at en:wiki plus an unknown number at
two dozen other language editions of Wikipedia. Multiply that kind of
attention across a few hundred articles and one year: this has the potential
to become a major source of web traffic to the donating institution.
Bundesarchiv has retained full copyright over high resolution copies of the
images they uploaded (the copyright in these instances is uncontroversial).
Without any actual advertising, readers have been using the source link from
the image hosting page to go to the Bundesarchiv site and purchase high
resolution files. Their sales of high resolution images have increased
significantly since the donation.
Whether and how to give additional credit is a question I'd rather not
address personally. Whatever the community decides I'll honor; the salient
point is that even with what we do right now it's a net benefit to
institutions that are smart about it. We need to communicate to them where
the advantages are, since this is new territory and a radical departure from
how they're used to operating.
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.
-Durova
On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 10:35 AM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com>wrote;wrote:
How many people click through to the image itself?
That is where the
credit is, and the link onwards to the source. Would it help if the
source (if it was an institution, rather than an individual
photographer) was automagically credited in the articles, not just on
the image page? Or would that be the thin end of a wedge and be seen
as overt advertising? There are some photographer names that will
never be suitable to be treated this way, but if doing this for
reputable organisations made it more likely they would donate images,
is it worth looking at it again?
I also saw a reference somewhere to how having shortcuts dedicated to
an institutions photographs can avoid nofollow. Something like
[[:xy:image name.jpg]]? Is that acceptable or not?
Carcharoth
On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 6:27 PM, Durova<nadezhda.durova(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Babe_Ruth2.jpg
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>wroteote:
> 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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