The format with which they appear on the net makes them hard/very hard to copy. Contacting may be only option

On 1/11/07, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: I doubt the BBC has even considered it. The case under US law we generaly cite is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_Ltd._v._Corel_Corporation scanned images have not been found to be copyrightable underUS law. Since getting them off the website would involve rather a lot of work yes. However it would probably be better if someone in the US did it. -- geni _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

Do you have a url? Nina

Actually, I was shown this last night and it is possible to get the full resolution images at full size, you just have to mess around with the url a bit (basically, zoom in all the way, and at some point it says fullimage=false, and you just change it to fullimage=true). The images are huge and beautiful. One might argue, however, that since the edges of the paper are shown, they are images of three dimensional objects; however if someone is really worried about that they could just cut off the margins, although that decreases the value of the images somewhat. I think this /is/ something that it's conceivable the foundation could get sued over (IANAL), however in this case I think we'd be in the right, previous case law has gone with our side, and I think it's worth it to assert the larger communities right to freely see and use works which have entered the public domain. Also, can you just imagine how many images this would affect if the Foundation decided to get rid of all images which are similar to this (high quality images of closely held public domain two dimensional works)? We might as well shut down commons if that's the decision. Makemi _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l

> "A collection of rare maps of Africa, dating from 1530 to 1915, has been > made available for free on the internet by Northwestern University in the > US. " Is this something we should be storing too? I think we should at least > make an effort to contact them about it...

The format with which they appear on the net makes them hard/very hard to copy. Contacting may be only option

What I do wonder about is the ethical question around wholesale copying of another site filled with free material. They have a role too in whatever niche they find. They are already in compliance with our mission to keep such information free. They have a role in the open access market. There can be valid reasons for the wholesale copying.of these databases; preservation redundancy could be one. Still, just because an act is legal does not mean that that same act is ethical.

I think Nina Stratton was going to ask, but I could've misunderstood what she was talking about. Perhaps it would help to ask someone with more press experience to talk to them, so they may have heard about the Wikipedian: David? On 1/12/07, David Gerard <dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote: >On 12/01/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: > > >>What I do wonder about is the ethical question around wholesale copying >>of another site filled with free material. They have a role too in >>whatever niche they find. They are already in compliance with our >>mission to keep such information free. They have a role in the open >>access market. There can be valid reasons for the wholesale copying.of >>these databases; preservation redundancy could be one. Still, just >>because an act is legal does not mean that that same act is ethical. >> >> >Has anyone, uh, called them up, said "hi" and asked for anything >important we would need to know to mirror the maps on Commons? I would >be very surprised if we didn't have a pile of contributors and >supporters at any university of decent size ... > >Of course, attribution as reasonably desired would be polite to detail >on the image page - "thank you" costs very little and goes a long way. >

On 1/12/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: I'm not sure that this is a matter of us thinking we're a better host than Northwestern U for anyone else. It's us thinking that for our own use, we're a better host than them, because having a local copy is good. Because they might move their stuff in future or even take it down. Lots of reasons that for our own purposes, taking our own copy is useful.

On 1/13/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: Licenses and technical details can change at any time. We aren't really hurting for disk space, and why shouldn't Commons host all sorts of Free media suitable for reference works like Wikipedia, even if they aren't being used at that exact moment? Hosting them means further exposure and archival - Wikipedians may see the maps who would never have visited the university map, backups of Commons will also entail backups of their content (and dumps of Commons are much more common than dumps of that site), etc. And it's not like it's all that difference - a wget or curl, and then one of the mass upload tools, or something like pywikipedia's imageharvest.py. Further, how does our mirroring their content *hurt* them? They are not a commercial enterprise; ostensibly they are devoted to the development and spreading of knowledge and information. Leaving out entirely the issue of them being a university (even though they are private, they are still subsidized through tax breaks and funding and that sort of thing) and thus the American tax-payers on this list having a right to the material, our mirroring would seem to only further their mission. People hate Microsoft for many reasons, but mostly because of what it did to achieve that dominance and what it does (or doesn't do) with all the money and power that position entails. They hate the crappy software, the lack of security and usability, the high fees, the overreaching DRM and legalities, the illegal business practices, the standards it destroys and monetizes for its own gain, the lack of innovation, and so on and so forth. I don't think the actual dominance itself is the issue. It makes all the reasons I listed much more pressing than the equivalent criticisms which could be leveled against, say, Apple, but it is not itself the reason. Wikimedia foundation projects dominating could be bad if we *abuse* it. But if Wikimedia foundation projects are dominant because the infrastructure is stable and capable of achieving what is asked of it, if they are dominant because they have so much content already, if there is a good community already there, if various network effects reward contributing to foundation projects, etc. then why is it a bad thing? --Gwern

We should think about how the maps would be useful for us. Simply mirroring the content doesn't add value. How can we add value to them, by combining maps and other information (maybe into a map/timeline for particular places that we have articles for)? For example, we could show how the political/colonial boundaries changed over time for the continent as a whole or for regions. It might be a useful supplement to articles to develop some form of online, historical atlas about places. It may be possible to georeference some of them, so that they can be viewed in a GIS/web mapping service, to work with them on adding value integrating different sources of information, and begin to synthesize information into a digital atlas format. We could combine maps available from Northwestern, with other sources (e.g. Library of Congress, other map libraries). The University of Texas and Penn State map libraries come to mind as other places with treasure trove of materials that are not online yet.

On 1/13/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: There are very few things we need to do. In this case the reason is why not?

Plently of other industries have been dominated to the same degree without the same level of disslike.

Nah people will find plently of other reasons to disslike us. They already do.

How many flicker images do we have these days anyway. One of the common values of provideing free stuff is seeing it reused.

Why would they need to do that? What do people lose by haveing their material on wikimedia projects? You see a key part of the vission of free material is that others will use it. There are probably near 1000 sites that use large chunks of wikimedia material.

That would really rather depend on the system of ethics. Calling your morality an ethical system does not make it so.

On 1/14/07, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote: Not exactly. I don't support say radom party photos. However scans of historic documents are worth includeing.

Daleks don't appear in star treck.

My point was not about permissions. It even assumes that we will receive all the permissions we want. It's about why we are better suited to carry this material than Northwestern U.

geni wrote: I've had some success with hacking the URL, but it likes to break randomly: http://ansel.library.northwestern.edu/ImageServer/index.jsp?action=&res… It may also be possible to get at the stored jpeg2.