Dear all,
Great news from Italy! After over one year of talks between Wikimedia Italia and MiBAC, the Italian Ministry of Cultural and Artistic Heritage (MiBAC is a quasi-acronym from its official Italian denomination "Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali"), we have managed to sign an agreement which will allow us to participate to Wiki Loves Monuments in a much broader way that we could before. MiBAC explicitly states in the agreement that *«the Ministry considers particularly useful, in order to promote awareness of such goods [the ones managed by the Ministry - note that this is different from "owned by the Ministry", see below], the production of specific items about them on wikipedia.org, in all its languages, and the publication of images on Wikimedia Commons, at the site http://commons.wikimedia.org.%C2%BB http://commons.wikimedia.org.xn--yba/* Moreover, it will explicitly ask to its local branches to give us the list of "lesser" monuments, those which are not usually known but are nonetheless beautiful... and poorly described in Wikipedia. Italian law however puts some constraints unrelated to copyright issues: this means that the pictures uploaded must bear the the template {{Italy-MiBAC-disclaimer}}[1]. The text of the disclaimer is shown below; to understand what it actually means we put up this text, which provides a bit of context about the history of the agreement and the Italian law.
As you know, Wiki Loves Monuments started in 2010, and went European in 2011. Wikimedia Italy wanted to participate to that edition, but we discovered a great obstacle to the project, a law called "Codice Urbani"[2].
"Codice Urbani" is an Italian law which states, among other provisions, that to publish pictures of "cultural goods" (meaning in theory every cultural and artistical object/place) for commercial purposes it is mandatory to obtain an authorization from the local branch of the Ministry of Arts and Cultural Heritage, the "Soprintendenza"[3]. The Superintendence can require the payment of a fee; moreover, the authorization granted is will be for the requester only (usually a publishing company) and only for a given publication. Personal use and use for study and research are allowed without a request for authorization. You certainly noticed that Codice Urbani is problematic for a smooth realization of Wiki Loves Monuments. In fact, I can make pictures of monuments I can give up my copyright allowing others to copy my image without requiring my explicit permission; but the Codice Urbani says that if I want to publish those picture a fee can be requested to me, so anyway a third party can't make profit out of my picture without asking in advance an authorization to the Soprintendenza. This issue is completely independent from any issue regarding copyright: Coliseum and the Leaning Tower fall (no pun intended) under Codice Urbani. So we were in difficulty in organizing a photocampaign in Italy and asking people to (potentially) break the Italian law, since the unclear points where many.
We started challenging this problems in Summer 2011: we contacted people from the Ministry, we set up a draft of the project, we met once in Rome to speak with high delegates. To make a long story short, we managed to obtain the promise of receiving the lists of the monuments which could be photographed: but then things slowed down, our contacts were moved to other offices, and the Ministry himself (who was aware of the project) was replaced or political reasons (unrelated to WLM, of course). Thus, we could not participate in WLM 2011.
In December 2011 we started working out a new strategy: meanwhile, as you can imagine, endless discussions were made in our mailing lists. We contacted NEXA Center for Internet and Society[4a], an institution from the University of Turin which supports and promotes Creative Commons: they are actually the official contact for Creative Commons in Italy! We decided to allocate some resources and hired Deborah De Angelis[4b], a lawyer specialized in Creative Commons and cultural heritage. Deborah, who is based in Rome, started contacting again the (renewed) Ministry of Cultural Heritage, proposing a draft for an agreement between the Ministry and Wikimedia Italia. Several months of discussions and bouncing of documents followed.
In January Wikimedia Italy also hired a Project Manager for Wiki Loves Monuments, Emma Tracanella. Emma started developing and pursuing another tactic developed by WMI to get permission for taking pictures of monuments: asking directly the authorization to specific municipalities and institutions. In fact, it is the "owners" of a monument who have the right to authorize pictures of it. It's Codice Urbani itself which gives them these rights, indeed.
Thus, we had two strategies: one top-down, that is discussing with the MiBac to obtain an agreement clearly stating that we could organize Wiki Loves Monuments in Italy, and explaining which were the boundaries of the law (the dream here would have been to change the law itself, but we would have needed to bring the issue in Parliament, and more urged matters pressed); the other bottom-up, that is asking the permissions to the single institutions. Note that the bottom-up strategy meant having to deal with 8000+ different municipalities, endless cultural institutions, uncountable churches (every parish priest has the right for is own parish, unless this is in some special list from the Ministry). We let you imagine the complexity of the landscape that was opening in front of us: it was a nightmare, but at least it could give us some "free" monuments.
Emma started making calls to everyone who could give us authorization for taking photo of monuments. We started spreading the word, calling friends of friends for help, starting a blog (our wikilovesmonuments.it), begging for authorization everywhere. We had a great ally in APT Services, the Tourist office for Emilia Romagna, with which we already partnered in the past for some Wikipedia-related projects; they organized meetings with mayors and regional politicians. In the end, we reached different regions and provinces, and several municipalities (here there is a list[5]). Our list of monuments counts in hundreds, and it's still improving everyday (here there is a map of the lists[6]). A drop in the ocean, if you think at the enormous Italian cultural heritage: but it is all we managed to get.
This up to yesterday. Today, we had finally an answer from MiBAC, and it was positive. The Ministry signed an agreement with Wikimedia Italia saying that:
- the Ministry, with the aim of promoting the knowledge of the Italian Cultural Heritage, finds useful that the monuments have an article on Wikipedia with photographs. (yes, it is *actually* saying that). - the Ministry will send an internal communication asking to every Soprintendenza to send us a list of the monuments they control, along with a permission to take photos of them. Pics of these monuments can be released in CC-BY-SA, in the sense that the maker of the photograph can relinquish his own rights; no fee is needed to be paid to the monuments' owners by the photographer if he does not want to use them for commercial purposes.
As part of the agreement, we however have to add a disclaimer to the pictures; the one in {{Italy-MiBAC-disclaimer}}. The text of the advice is shown below: *This image reproduces a property belonging to the Italian cultural heritage as entrusted to the Italian government. Such images are regulated by Articles 106 et seq. of the Italian Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape under Legislative Decree No. 42, dated January 22, 2004, and its subsequent amendments. These regulations, unrelated to copyright regulations, establish a system for the protection Italy’s historic and artistic heritage and its standards of dignity. Among other things, these regulations provide for the payment of a concession fee by those who intend to benefit economically from reproductions of property belonging to the Italian cultural heritage. Reproduction of this image is permitted for personal use or study. A further authorization by the Italian Ministry of Heritage and Culture is required for reproduction for any other purpose, and particularly for commercial use. Such commercial use includes, but is not limited to, use in (a) any form of advertising, and (b) any company name, logo, trademark, image, activity, or product.*
Our lawyers (which are people from Creative Commons Italy) assure us that this license is compatible with CC-BY-SA, because the provisions of the license, which deals only with intellectual propriety, is saved and the limitation occurs on another, different, level. In other words, the photographer releases the picture in CC-BY-SA, the Ministry allows to put it on Commons waiving its own right to get a fee, but Codice Urbani keeps staying in force, protecting the pics from automatic commercial use by third parties. To be more explicit, please have a look the the section 5 of the Legal Code of Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-3.0 [7], which we are quoted below: boldface is ours. *5. Representations, Warranties and Disclaimer**Unless otherwise mutually agreed to by the parties in writing, licensor offers the work as-is and makes no representations or warranties of any kind concerning the work, express, implied, statutory or otherwise, including, without limitation, warranties of title, merchantibility, fitness for a particular purpose, noninfringement, or the absence of latent or other defects, accuracy, or the presence of absence of errors, whether or not discoverable. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties, so such exclusion may not apply to you*
As you may see, it's true that the author of the photo cannot vouch for the merchantability of the images, since this is not a right of his/her; but CC-BY-SA explicitly takes into account that case.
To the best of our knowledge, this agreement is the first one of its kind in Italy, and sees an official recognition of the existence of Creative Commons licenses; moreover, it is a necessary step towards new regulations recognizing the importance of the free dissemination of information about the cultural and artistic heritage, which cannot just be "museum stuff". We are thrilled to see what will come out, and how Italians will answer to this challenge. We are very proud to have obtained this.
Feel free to ask us anything you think relevant, we'll do what we can to answer. We are also open to prepare some FAQ, if we see the need for them.
Best regards, Cristian and Andrea on behalf of the Wiki Loves Monuments organizing committee in Italy References
[1] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Italy-MiBAC-disclaimer
[2] http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codice_Urbani
[3] http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soprintendenze
[4b] http://nexa.polito.it/fellows
[5] http://www.wikilovesmonuments.it/istituzioni/
[6] http://www.wikilovesmonuments.it/monumenti/lista-monumenti/ ; also on wiki at: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progetto:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2012/Monumenti
Wow!!!!! I know how hard was this for all of you... felicidades!!!!
Sorry the length, I'm on my cellphone... ;-) El 13/09/2012 09:57, "Andrea Zanni" zanni.andrea84@gmail.com escribió:
Dear all,
Great news from Italy! After over one year of talks between Wikimedia Italia and MiBAC, the Italian Ministry of Cultural and Artistic Heritage (MiBAC is a quasi-acronym from its official Italian denomination "Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali"), we have managed to sign an agreement which will allow us to participate to Wiki Loves Monuments in a much broader way that we could before. MiBAC explicitly states in the agreement that *«the Ministry considers particularly useful, in order to promote awareness of such goods [the ones managed by the Ministry - note that this is different from "owned by the Ministry", see below], the production of specific items about them on wikipedia.org, in all its languages, and the publication of images on Wikimedia Commons, at the site http://commons.wikimedia.org.%C2%BB http://commons.wikimedia.org.xn--yba/* Moreover, it will explicitly ask to its local branches to give us the list of "lesser" monuments, those which are not usually known but are nonetheless beautiful... and poorly described in Wikipedia. Italian law however puts some constraints unrelated to copyright issues: this means that the pictures uploaded must bear the the template {{Italy-MiBAC-disclaimer}}[1]. The text of the disclaimer is shown below; to understand what it actually means we put up this text, which provides a bit of context about the history of the agreement and the Italian law.
As you know, Wiki Loves Monuments started in 2010, and went European in 2011. Wikimedia Italy wanted to participate to that edition, but we discovered a great obstacle to the project, a law called "Codice Urbani"[2].
"Codice Urbani" is an Italian law which states, among other provisions, that to publish pictures of "cultural goods" (meaning in theory every cultural and artistical object/place) for commercial purposes it is mandatory to obtain an authorization from the local branch of the Ministry of Arts and Cultural Heritage, the "Soprintendenza"[3]. The Superintendence can require the payment of a fee; moreover, the authorization granted is will be for the requester only (usually a publishing company) and only for a given publication. Personal use and use for study and research are allowed without a request for authorization. You certainly noticed that Codice Urbani is problematic for a smooth realization of Wiki Loves Monuments. In fact, I can make pictures of monuments I can give up my copyright allowing others to copy my image without requiring my explicit permission; but the Codice Urbani says that if I want to publish those picture a fee can be requested to me, so anyway a third party can't make profit out of my picture without asking in advance an authorization to the Soprintendenza. This issue is completely independent from any issue regarding copyright: Coliseum and the Leaning Tower fall (no pun intended) under Codice Urbani. So we were in difficulty in organizing a photocampaign in Italy and asking people to (potentially) break the Italian law, since the unclear points where many.
We started challenging this problems in Summer 2011: we contacted people from the Ministry, we set up a draft of the project, we met once in Rome to speak with high delegates. To make a long story short, we managed to obtain the promise of receiving the lists of the monuments which could be photographed: but then things slowed down, our contacts were moved to other offices, and the Ministry himself (who was aware of the project) was replaced or political reasons (unrelated to WLM, of course). Thus, we could not participate in WLM 2011.
In December 2011 we started working out a new strategy: meanwhile, as you can imagine, endless discussions were made in our mailing lists. We contacted NEXA Center for Internet and Society[4a], an institution from the University of Turin which supports and promotes Creative Commons: they are actually the official contact for Creative Commons in Italy! We decided to allocate some resources and hired Deborah De Angelis[4b], a lawyer specialized in Creative Commons and cultural heritage. Deborah, who is based in Rome, started contacting again the (renewed) Ministry of Cultural Heritage, proposing a draft for an agreement between the Ministry and Wikimedia Italia. Several months of discussions and bouncing of documents followed.
In January Wikimedia Italy also hired a Project Manager for Wiki Loves Monuments, Emma Tracanella. Emma started developing and pursuing another tactic developed by WMI to get permission for taking pictures of monuments: asking directly the authorization to specific municipalities and institutions. In fact, it is the "owners" of a monument who have the right to authorize pictures of it. It's Codice Urbani itself which gives them these rights, indeed.
Thus, we had two strategies: one top-down, that is discussing with the MiBac to obtain an agreement clearly stating that we could organize Wiki Loves Monuments in Italy, and explaining which were the boundaries of the law (the dream here would have been to change the law itself, but we would have needed to bring the issue in Parliament, and more urged matters pressed); the other bottom-up, that is asking the permissions to the single institutions. Note that the bottom-up strategy meant having to deal with 8000+ different municipalities, endless cultural institutions, uncountable churches (every parish priest has the right for is own parish, unless this is in some special list from the Ministry). We let you imagine the complexity of the landscape that was opening in front of us: it was a nightmare, but at least it could give us some "free" monuments.
Emma started making calls to everyone who could give us authorization for taking photo of monuments. We started spreading the word, calling friends of friends for help, starting a blog (our wikilovesmonuments.it), begging for authorization everywhere. We had a great ally in APT Services, the Tourist office for Emilia Romagna, with which we already partnered in the past for some Wikipedia-related projects; they organized meetings with mayors and regional politicians. In the end, we reached different regions and provinces, and several municipalities (here there is a list[5]). Our list of monuments counts in hundreds, and it's still improving everyday (here there is a map of the lists[6]). A drop in the ocean, if you think at the enormous Italian cultural heritage: but it is all we managed to get.
This up to yesterday. Today, we had finally an answer from MiBAC, and it was positive. The Ministry signed an agreement with Wikimedia Italia saying that:
- the Ministry, with the aim of promoting the knowledge of the Italian
Cultural Heritage, finds useful that the monuments have an article on Wikipedia with photographs. (yes, it is *actually* saying that).
- the Ministry will send an internal communication asking to every
Soprintendenza to send us a list of the monuments they control, along with a permission to take photos of them. Pics of these monuments can be released in CC-BY-SA, in the sense that the maker of the photograph can relinquish his own rights; no fee is needed to be paid to the monuments' owners by the photographer if he does not want to use them for commercial purposes.
As part of the agreement, we however have to add a disclaimer to the pictures; the one in {{Italy-MiBAC-disclaimer}}. The text of the advice is shown below: *This image reproduces a property belonging to the Italian cultural heritage as entrusted to the Italian government. Such images are regulated by Articles 106 et seq. of the Italian Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape under Legislative Decree No. 42, dated January 22, 2004, and its subsequent amendments. These regulations, unrelated to copyright regulations, establish a system for the protection Italy’s historic and artistic heritage and its standards of dignity. Among other things, these regulations provide for the payment of a concession fee by those who intend to benefit economically from reproductions of property belonging to the Italian cultural heritage. Reproduction of this image is permitted for personal use or study. A further authorization by the Italian Ministry of Heritage and Culture is required for reproduction for any other purpose, and particularly for commercial use. Such commercial use includes, but is not limited to, use in (a) any form of advertising, and (b) any company name, logo, trademark, image, activity, or product.*
Our lawyers (which are people from Creative Commons Italy) assure us that this license is compatible with CC-BY-SA, because the provisions of the license, which deals only with intellectual propriety, is saved and the limitation occurs on another, different, level. In other words, the photographer releases the picture in CC-BY-SA, the Ministry allows to put it on Commons waiving its own right to get a fee, but Codice Urbani keeps staying in force, protecting the pics from automatic commercial use by third parties. To be more explicit, please have a look the the section 5 of the Legal Code of Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-3.0 [7], which we are quoted below: boldface is ours. *5. Representations, Warranties and Disclaimer* *Unless otherwise mutually agreed to by the parties in writing, licensor offers the work as-is and makes no representations or warranties of any kind concerning the work, express, implied, statutory or otherwise, including, without limitation, warranties of title, merchantibility, fitness for a particular purpose, noninfringement, or the absence of latent or other defects, accuracy, or the presence of absence of errors, whether or not discoverable. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties, so such exclusion may not apply to you*
As you may see, it's true that the author of the photo cannot vouch for the merchantability of the images, since this is not a right of his/her; but CC-BY-SA explicitly takes into account that case.
To the best of our knowledge, this agreement is the first one of its kind in Italy, and sees an official recognition of the existence of Creative Commons licenses; moreover, it is a necessary step towards new regulations recognizing the importance of the free dissemination of information about the cultural and artistic heritage, which cannot just be "museum stuff". We are thrilled to see what will come out, and how Italians will answer to this challenge. We are very proud to have obtained this.
Feel free to ask us anything you think relevant, we'll do what we can to answer. We are also open to prepare some FAQ, if we see the need for them.
Best regards, Cristian and Andrea on behalf of the Wiki Loves Monuments organizing committee in Italy References
[1] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Italy-MiBAC-disclaimer
[2] http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codice_Urbani
[3] http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soprintendenze
[4b] http://nexa.polito.it/fellows
[5] http://www.wikilovesmonuments.it/istituzioni/
[6] http://www.wikilovesmonuments.it/monumenti/lista-monumenti/ ; also on wiki at: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progetto:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2012/Monumenti
[7] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode
Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org
Good news, and good work! Let me summarize it, from a non lawyer point of view, to check if I undestood it: 1. Old monuments are not copyrighted 2. MiBAC grants that I can license a photo under CC-BY-SA without paying any fee 3. Is up to third parties to pay the fee to sopraintendenza if they wish to use it for commercial purposes, and this is not any restriction related with CC-BY-SA
Vicenç
Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2012 14:56:45 +0200 From: zanni.andrea84@gmail.com To: wikilovesmonuments@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Wiki Loves Monuments] MIBAC agreement for Wiki Loves Monuments in Italy
Dear all, Great news from Italy! After over one year of talks between Wikimedia Italia and MiBAC, the Italian Ministry of Cultural and Artistic Heritage (MiBAC is a quasi-acronym from its official Italian denomination "Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali"), we have managed to sign an agreement which will allow us to participate to Wiki Loves Monuments in a much broader way that we could before. MiBAC explicitly states in the agreement that «the Ministry considers particularly useful, in order to promote awareness of such goods [the ones managed by the Ministry - note that this is different from "owned by the Ministry", see below], the production of specific items about them on wikipedia.org, in all its languages, and the publication of images on Wikimedia Commons, at the site http://commons.wikimedia.org.%C2%BB Moreover, it will explicitly ask to its local branches to give us the list of "lesser" monuments, those which are not usually known but are nonetheless beautiful... and poorly described in Wikipedia. Italian law however puts some constraints unrelated to copyright issues: this means that the pictures uploaded must bear the the template {{Italy-MiBAC-disclaimer}}[1]. The text of the disclaimer is shown below; to understand what it actually means we put up this text, which provides a bit of context about the history of the agreement and the Italian law. As you know, Wiki Loves Monuments started in 2010, and went European in 2011. Wikimedia Italy wanted to participate to that edition, but we discovered a great obstacle to the project, a law called "Codice Urbani"[2]. "Codice Urbani" is an Italian law which states, among other provisions, that to publish pictures of "cultural goods" (meaning in theory every cultural and artistical object/place) for commercial purposes it is mandatory to obtain an authorization from the local branch of the Ministry of Arts and Cultural Heritage, the "Soprintendenza"[3]. The Superintendence can require the payment of a fee; moreover, the authorization granted is will be for the requester only (usually a publishing company) and only for a given publication. Personal use and use for study and research are allowed without a request for authorization. You certainly noticed that Codice Urbani is problematic for a smooth realization of Wiki Loves Monuments. In fact, I can make pictures of monuments I can give up my copyright allowing others to copy my image without requiring my explicit permission; but the Codice Urbani says that if I want to publish those picture a fee can be requested to me, so anyway a third party can't make profit out of my picture without asking in advance an authorization to the Soprintendenza. This issue is completely independent from any issue regarding copyright: Coliseum and the Leaning Tower fall (no pun intended) under Codice Urbani. So we were in difficulty in organizing a photocampaign in Italy and asking people to (potentially) break the Italian law, since the unclear points where many. We started challenging this problems in Summer 2011: we contacted people from the Ministry, we set up a draft of the project, we met once in Rome to speak with high delegates. To make a long story short, we managed to obtain the promise of receiving the lists of the monuments which could be photographed: but then things slowed down, our contacts were moved to other offices, and the Ministry himself (who was aware of the project) was replaced or political reasons (unrelated to WLM, of course). Thus, we could not participate in WLM 2011. In December 2011 we started working out a new strategy: meanwhile, as you can imagine, endless discussions were made in our mailing lists. We contacted NEXA Center for Internet and Society[4a], an institution from the University of Turin which supports and promotes Creative Commons: they are actually the official contact for Creative Commons in Italy! We decided to allocate some resources and hired Deborah De Angelis[4b], a lawyer specialized in Creative Commons and cultural heritage. Deborah, who is based in Rome, started contacting again the (renewed) Ministry of Cultural Heritage, proposing a draft for an agreement between the Ministry and Wikimedia Italia. Several months of discussions and bouncing of documents followed. In January Wikimedia Italy also hired a Project Manager for Wiki Loves Monuments, Emma Tracanella. Emma started developing and pursuing another tactic developed by WMI to get permission for taking pictures of monuments: asking directly the authorization to specific municipalities and institutions. In fact, it is the "owners" of a monument who have the right to authorize pictures of it. It's Codice Urbani itself which gives them these rights, indeed. Thus, we had two strategies: one top-down, that is discussing with the MiBac to obtain an agreement clearly stating that we could organize Wiki Loves Monuments in Italy, and explaining which were the boundaries of the law (the dream here would have been to change the law itself, but we would have needed to bring the issue in Parliament, and more urged matters pressed); the other bottom-up, that is asking the permissions to the single institutions. Note that the bottom-up strategy meant having to deal with 8000+ different municipalities, endless cultural institutions, uncountable churches (every parish priest has the right for is own parish, unless this is in some special list from the Ministry). We let you imagine the complexity of the landscape that was opening in front of us: it was a nightmare, but at least it could give us some "free" monuments. Emma started making calls to everyone who could give us authorization for taking photo of monuments. We started spreading the word, calling friends of friends for help, starting a blog (our wikilovesmonuments.it), begging for authorization everywhere. We had a great ally in APT Services, the Tourist office for Emilia Romagna, with which we already partnered in the past for some Wikipedia-related projects; they organized meetings with mayors and regional politicians. In the end, we reached different regions and provinces, and several municipalities (here there is a list[5]). Our list of monuments counts in hundreds, and it's still improving everyday (here there is a map of the lists[6]). A drop in the ocean, if you think at the enormous Italian cultural heritage: but it is all we managed to get. This up to yesterday. Today, we had finally an answer from MiBAC, and it was positive. The Ministry signed an agreement with Wikimedia Italia saying that: the Ministry, with the aim of promoting the knowledge of the Italian Cultural Heritage, finds useful that the monuments have an article on Wikipedia with photographs. (yes, it is *actually* saying that). the Ministry will send an internal communication asking to every Soprintendenza to send us a list of the monuments they control, along with a permission to take photos of them. Pics of these monuments can be released in CC-BY-SA, in the sense that the maker of the photograph can relinquish his own rights; no fee is needed to be paid to the monuments' owners by the photographer if he does not want to use them for commercial purposes. As part of the agreement, we however have to add a disclaimer to the pictures; the one in {{Italy-MiBAC-disclaimer}}. The text of the advice is shown below: This image reproduces a property belonging to the Italian cultural heritage as entrusted to the Italian government. Such images are regulated by Articles 106 et seq. of the Italian Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape under Legislative Decree No. 42, dated January 22, 2004, and its subsequent amendments. These regulations, unrelated to copyright regulations, establish a system for the protection Italy’s historic and artistic heritage and its standards of dignity. Among other things, these regulations provide for the payment of a concession fee by those who intend to benefit economically from reproductions of property belonging to the Italian cultural heritage. Reproduction of this image is permitted for personal use or study. A further authorization by the Italian Ministry of Heritage and Culture is required for reproduction for any other purpose, and particularly for commercial use. Such commercial use includes, but is not limited to, use in (a) any form of advertising, and (b) any company name, logo, trademark, image, activity, or product. Our lawyers (which are people from Creative Commons Italy) assure us that this license is compatible with CC-BY-SA, because the provisions of the license, which deals only with intellectual propriety, is saved and the limitation occurs on another, different, level. In other words, the photographer releases the picture in CC-BY-SA, the Ministry allows to put it on Commons waiving its own right to get a fee, but Codice Urbani keeps staying in force, protecting the pics from automatic commercial use by third parties. To be more explicit, please have a look the the section 5 of the Legal Code of Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-3.0 [7], which we are quoted below: boldface is ours. 5. Representations, Warranties and Disclaimer
Unless otherwise mutually agreed to by the parties in writing, licensor offers the work as-is and makes no representations or warranties of any kind concerning the work, express, implied, statutory or otherwise, including, without limitation, warranties of title, merchantibility, fitness for a particular purpose, noninfringement, or the absence of latent or other defects, accuracy, or the presence of absence of errors, whether or not discoverable. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties, so such exclusion may not apply to you As you may see, it's true that the author of the photo cannot vouch for the merchantability of the images, since this is not a right of his/her; but CC-BY-SA explicitly takes into account that case. To the best of our knowledge, this agreement is the first one of its kind in Italy, and sees an official recognition of the existence of Creative Commons licenses; moreover, it is a necessary step towards new regulations recognizing the importance of the free dissemination of information about the cultural and artistic heritage, which cannot just be "museum stuff". We are thrilled to see what will come out, and how Italians will answer to this challenge. We are very proud to have obtained this. Feel free to ask us anything you think relevant, we'll do what we can to answer. We are also open to prepare some FAQ, if we see the need for them. Best regards, Cristian and Andreaon behalf of the Wiki Loves Monuments organizing committee in Italy
References [1] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Italy-MiBAC-disclaimer [2] http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codice_Urbani [3] http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soprintendenze [4a] http://nexa.polito.it/ [4b] http://nexa.polito.it/fellows [5] http://www.wikilovesmonuments.it/istituzioni/ [6] http://www.wikilovesmonuments.it/monumenti/lista-monumenti/ ; also on wiki at: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progetto:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2012/Monumenti [7] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode
_______________________________________________ Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org
Thanks Oslmar and Vicenç.
Regarding your questions, Vicenç: 1. yes 2. yes 3. yes, you understood correctly.
Aubrey
On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 3:45 PM, Vicenç Riullop vriullop@hotmail.comwrote:
Good news, and good work! Let me summarize it, from a non lawyer point of view, to check if I undestood it:
- Old monuments are not copyrighted
- MiBAC grants that I can license a photo under CC-BY-SA without paying
any fee 3. Is up to third parties to pay the fee to sopraintendenza if they wish to use it for commercial purposes, and this is not any restriction related with CC-BY-SA
Vicenç
Date: Thu, 13 Sep 2012 14:56:45 +0200 From: zanni.andrea84@gmail.com To: wikilovesmonuments@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: [Wiki Loves Monuments] MIBAC agreement for Wiki Loves Monuments in Italy
Dear all,
Great news from Italy! After over one year of talks between Wikimedia Italia and MiBAC, the Italian Ministry of Cultural and Artistic Heritage (MiBAC is a quasi-acronym from its official Italian denomination "Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali"), we have managed to sign an agreement which will allow us to participate to Wiki Loves Monuments in a much broader way that we could before. MiBAC explicitly states in the agreement that *«the Ministry considers particularly useful, in order to promote awareness of such goods [the ones managed by the Ministry - note that this is different from "owned by the Ministry", see below], the production of specific items about them on wikipedia.org, in all its languages, and the publication of images on Wikimedia Commons, at the site http://commons.wikimedia.org.%C2%BB http://commons.wikimedia.org.xn--yba/* Moreover, it will explicitly ask to its local branches to give us the list of "lesser" monuments, those which are not usually known but are nonetheless beautiful... and poorly described in Wikipedia. Italian law however puts some constraints unrelated to copyright issues: this means that the pictures uploaded must bear the the template {{Italy-MiBAC-disclaimer}}[1]. The text of the disclaimer is shown below; to understand what it actually means we put up this text, which provides a bit of context about the history of the agreement and the Italian law.
As you know, Wiki Loves Monuments started in 2010, and went European in 2011. Wikimedia Italy wanted to participate to that edition, but we discovered a great obstacle to the project, a law called "Codice Urbani"[2].
"Codice Urbani" is an Italian law which states, among other provisions, that to publish pictures of "cultural goods" (meaning in theory every cultural and artistical object/place) for commercial purposes it is mandatory to obtain an authorization from the local branch of the Ministry of Arts and Cultural Heritage, the "Soprintendenza"[3]. The Superintendence can require the payment of a fee; moreover, the authorization granted is will be for the requester only (usually a publishing company) and only for a given publication. Personal use and use for study and research are allowed without a request for authorization. You certainly noticed that Codice Urbani is problematic for a smooth realization of Wiki Loves Monuments. In fact, I can make pictures of monuments I can give up my copyright allowing others to copy my image without requiring my explicit permission; but the Codice Urbani says that if I want to publish those picture a fee can be requested to me, so anyway a third party can't make profit out of my picture without asking in advance an authorization to the Soprintendenza. This issue is completely independent from any issue regarding copyright: Coliseum and the Leaning Tower fall (no pun intended) under Codice Urbani. So we were in difficulty in organizing a photocampaign in Italy and asking people to (potentially) break the Italian law, since the unclear points where many.
We started challenging this problems in Summer 2011: we contacted people from the Ministry, we set up a draft of the project, we met once in Rome to speak with high delegates. To make a long story short, we managed to obtain the promise of receiving the lists of the monuments which could be photographed: but then things slowed down, our contacts were moved to other offices, and the Ministry himself (who was aware of the project) was replaced or political reasons (unrelated to WLM, of course). Thus, we could not participate in WLM 2011.
In December 2011 we started working out a new strategy: meanwhile, as you can imagine, endless discussions were made in our mailing lists. We contacted NEXA Center for Internet and Society[4a], an institution from the University of Turin which supports and promotes Creative Commons: they are actually the official contact for Creative Commons in Italy! We decided to allocate some resources and hired Deborah De Angelis[4b], a lawyer specialized in Creative Commons and cultural heritage. Deborah, who is based in Rome, started contacting again the (renewed) Ministry of Cultural Heritage, proposing a draft for an agreement between the Ministry and Wikimedia Italia. Several months of discussions and bouncing of documents followed.
In January Wikimedia Italy also hired a Project Manager for Wiki Loves Monuments, Emma Tracanella. Emma started developing and pursuing another tactic developed by WMI to get permission for taking pictures of monuments: asking directly the authorization to specific municipalities and institutions. In fact, it is the "owners" of a monument who have the right to authorize pictures of it. It's Codice Urbani itself which gives them these rights, indeed.
Thus, we had two strategies: one top-down, that is discussing with the MiBac to obtain an agreement clearly stating that we could organize Wiki Loves Monuments in Italy, and explaining which were the boundaries of the law (the dream here would have been to change the law itself, but we would have needed to bring the issue in Parliament, and more urged matters pressed); the other bottom-up, that is asking the permissions to the single institutions. Note that the bottom-up strategy meant having to deal with 8000+ different municipalities, endless cultural institutions, uncountable churches (every parish priest has the right for is own parish, unless this is in some special list from the Ministry). We let you imagine the complexity of the landscape that was opening in front of us: it was a nightmare, but at least it could give us some "free" monuments.
Emma started making calls to everyone who could give us authorization for taking photo of monuments. We started spreading the word, calling friends of friends for help, starting a blog (our wikilovesmonuments.it), begging for authorization everywhere. We had a great ally in APT Services, the Tourist office for Emilia Romagna, with which we already partnered in the past for some Wikipedia-related projects; they organized meetings with mayors and regional politicians. In the end, we reached different regions and provinces, and several municipalities (here there is a list[5]). Our list of monuments counts in hundreds, and it's still improving everyday (here there is a map of the lists[6]). A drop in the ocean, if you think at the enormous Italian cultural heritage: but it is all we managed to get.
This up to yesterday. Today, we had finally an answer from MiBAC, and it was positive. The Ministry signed an agreement with Wikimedia Italia saying that:
- the Ministry, with the aim of promoting the knowledge of the Italian
Cultural Heritage, finds useful that the monuments have an article on Wikipedia with photographs. (yes, it is *actually* saying that).
- the Ministry will send an internal communication asking to every
Soprintendenza to send us a list of the monuments they control, along with a permission to take photos of them. Pics of these monuments can be released in CC-BY-SA, in the sense that the maker of the photograph can relinquish his own rights; no fee is needed to be paid to the monuments' owners by the photographer if he does not want to use them for commercial purposes.
As part of the agreement, we however have to add a disclaimer to the pictures; the one in {{Italy-MiBAC-disclaimer}}. The text of the advice is shown below: *This image reproduces a property belonging to the Italian cultural heritage as entrusted to the Italian government. Such images are regulated by Articles 106 et seq. of the Italian Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape under Legislative Decree No. 42, dated January 22, 2004, and its subsequent amendments. These regulations, unrelated to copyright regulations, establish a system for the protection Italy’s historic and artistic heritage and its standards of dignity. Among other things, these regulations provide for the payment of a concession fee by those who intend to benefit economically from reproductions of property belonging to the Italian cultural heritage. Reproduction of this image is permitted for personal use or study. A further authorization by the Italian Ministry of Heritage and Culture is required for reproduction for any other purpose, and particularly for commercial use. Such commercial use includes, but is not limited to, use in (a) any form of advertising, and (b) any company name, logo, trademark, image, activity, or product.*
Our lawyers (which are people from Creative Commons Italy) assure us that this license is compatible with CC-BY-SA, because the provisions of the license, which deals only with intellectual propriety, is saved and the limitation occurs on another, different, level. In other words, the photographer releases the picture in CC-BY-SA, the Ministry allows to put it on Commons waiving its own right to get a fee, but Codice Urbani keeps staying in force, protecting the pics from automatic commercial use by third parties. To be more explicit, please have a look the the section 5 of the Legal Code of Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-3.0 [7], which we are quoted below: boldface is ours. *5. Representations, Warranties and Disclaimer* *Unless otherwise mutually agreed to by the parties in writing, licensor offers the work as-is and makes no representations or warranties of any kind concerning the work, express, implied, statutory or otherwise, including, without limitation, warranties of title, merchantibility, fitness for a particular purpose, noninfringement, or the absence of latent or other defects, accuracy, or the presence of absence of errors, whether or not discoverable. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties, so such exclusion may not apply to you*
As you may see, it's true that the author of the photo cannot vouch for the merchantability of the images, since this is not a right of his/her; but CC-BY-SA explicitly takes into account that case.
To the best of our knowledge, this agreement is the first one of its kind in Italy, and sees an official recognition of the existence of Creative Commons licenses; moreover, it is a necessary step towards new regulations recognizing the importance of the free dissemination of information about the cultural and artistic heritage, which cannot just be "museum stuff". We are thrilled to see what will come out, and how Italians will answer to this challenge. We are very proud to have obtained this.
Feel free to ask us anything you think relevant, we'll do what we can to answer. We are also open to prepare some FAQ, if we see the need for them.
Best regards, Cristian and Andrea on behalf of the Wiki Loves Monuments organizing committee in Italy References
[1] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Italy-MiBAC-disclaimer
[2] http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codice_Urbani
[3] http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soprintendenze
[4b] http://nexa.polito.it/fellows
[5] http://www.wikilovesmonuments.it/istituzioni/
[6] http://www.wikilovesmonuments.it/monumenti/lista-monumenti/ ; also on wiki at: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progetto:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2012/Monumenti
[7] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode
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Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org
To be more precise, it's up to third parties to CONTACT sopraintendenza if they wish to use it for commercial purposes (sopraintendenza may or may not ask for a fee), and this restriction is not related with CC-BY-SA .
ciao, .mau.
.mau. (maurizio codogno), 13/09/2012 16:01:
To be more precise, it's up to third parties to CONTACT sopraintendenza if they wish to use it for commercial purposes (sopraintendenza may or may not ask for a fee), and this restriction is not related with CC-BY-SA .
Nor to copyright in general, that's the whole trick (and if it comes from the ministry it has some weight!).
Nemo
Doesn't that make it a non-commercial license, i.e. CC-BY-SA NC
Commons doesn't allow images which are only licensed for non-commercial use.
WSC
On 13 September 2012 15:01, .mau. (maurizio codogno) wiki.mau@gmail.comwrote:
To be more precise, it's up to third parties to CONTACT sopraintendenza if they wish to use it for commercial purposes (sopraintendenza may or may not ask for a fee), and this restriction is not related with CC-BY-SA .
ciao, .mau.
Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org
Afaik this is a non-copyright restriction to protect uploaders. Commons will accept it anyway.
Maarten
Op 14 sep 2012 om 13:18 heeft WereSpielChequers <werespielchequers@gmail.com
het volgende geschreven:\
Doesn't that make it a non-commercial license, i.e. CC-BY-SA NC
Commons doesn't allow images which are only licensed for non- commercial use.
WSC
On 13 September 2012 15:01, .mau. (maurizio codogno) <wiki.mau@gmail.com
wrote:
To be more precise, it's up to third parties to CONTACT sopraintendenza if they wish to use it for commercial purposes (sopraintendenza may or may not ask for a fee), and this restriction is not related with CC-BY-SA .
ciao, .mau.
Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org
Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org
On 14/09/12 13:18, WereSpielChequers wrote:
Doesn't that make it a non-commercial license, i.e. CC-BY-SA NC
Commons doesn't allow images which are only licensed for non-commercial use.
WSC
That was also my understanding when I first saw the disclaimer. But see below where the lawyers, part of Creative Commons Italia itself, assert it is compatible with CC-BY-SA. This will likely appear several times at COM:DR, having to be explained. It would be worse if someone tried to do the same with their own photos (I place them under CC-BY-SA but I require a fee) but I don't think they could since they would only have copyright to battle with. Still, those photos are not completely free.
Great work, Andrea, result of a really hard work from WM-IT. Felicitazioni!
2012/9/14 Platonides platonides@gmail.com:
This will likely appear several times at COM:DR, having to be explained. It would be worse if someone tried to do the same with their own photos (I place them under CC-BY-SA but I require a fee) but I don't think they could since they would only have copyright to battle with.
Won't work. If a photographer wants to ask a fee for the use of his/her photos the law which is permitting him to do so is copyright law, i.e. the monopoly (albeit temporary) granted by the state the exclusive rights over the use of a work of art to the author of the work itself. Creative Commons licenses are enforced by the same law, i.e. the author, since he is the person with the right to do so, grants a thirds party the possibility to reproduce, re-use, etc his work. So you can not use the same copyright law to grant a right and negate it at the same time.
The (Italian) law for which you have to request authorization to publish photos of Italian cultural heritage come is *a different law* from copyright law, it has different grounds, namely it is based on the fact that the Italian States thinks it has the right to decide whether the picture of a monument can be published or not, with the aim of protecting the monuments via protecting (the "decency" of) their images.
To put this differently let me add that in the agreement we made with the Ministry the Ministry said that the choice of the license to use for releasing the images is a personal choice of the photographer, the Codice Urbani is not.[*]
To clarify, my understanding of the situation (but IANAL) the situation is more similar to the {{Personality rights}} template. There are laws, which are different from copyright law which prohibit to do something with a picture unless you obtain an authorization. This is a non-copyright restriction.
So, this is not the first time we find that photos that may have some sort restrictions on it which are not deriving from copyright.
Still, those photos are not completely free.
Disagree, they are completely free regarding the subject of copyright, and that's why the lawyers we contacted (which are people from Creative Commons Italia) assured us that this agreement (disclaimer included) is compatible with CC-BY-SA.
Cristian
[*] It's also worth noting that the Ministry, with this agreement is not "stretching" the existing law in any way. They also have not required that the photos must be free (because the Italian law doesn't impose such a thing), but it is stated that the photo participating in the contest will be released with CC-BY-SA. The difference is subtle, but the derives from the previous statement.
Would you be able to give a real world example what you cannot do with such a photo compared to a "standard" commons photo?
Rupert. Am 14.09.2012 17:41 schrieb "Cristian Consonni" kikkocristian@gmail.com:
2012/9/14 Platonides platonides@gmail.com:
This will likely appear several times at COM:DR, having to be explained. It would be worse if someone tried to do the same with their own photos (I place them under CC-BY-SA but I require a fee) but I don't think they could since they would only have copyright to battle with.
Won't work. If a photographer wants to ask a fee for the use of his/her photos the law which is permitting him to do so is copyright law, i.e. the monopoly (albeit temporary) granted by the state the exclusive rights over the use of a work of art to the author of the work itself. Creative Commons licenses are enforced by the same law, i.e. the author, since he is the person with the right to do so, grants a thirds party the possibility to reproduce, re-use, etc his work. So you can not use the same copyright law to grant a right and negate it at the same time.
The (Italian) law for which you have to request authorization to publish photos of Italian cultural heritage come is *a different law* from copyright law, it has different grounds, namely it is based on the fact that the Italian States thinks it has the right to decide whether the picture of a monument can be published or not, with the aim of protecting the monuments via protecting (the "decency" of) their images.
To put this differently let me add that in the agreement we made with the Ministry the Ministry said that the choice of the license to use for releasing the images is a personal choice of the photographer, the Codice Urbani is not.[*]
To clarify, my understanding of the situation (but IANAL) the situation is more similar to the {{Personality rights}} template. There are laws, which are different from copyright law which prohibit to do something with a picture unless you obtain an authorization. This is a non-copyright restriction.
So, this is not the first time we find that photos that may have some sort restrictions on it which are not deriving from copyright.
Still, those photos are not completely free.
Disagree, they are completely free regarding the subject of copyright, and that's why the lawyers we contacted (which are people from Creative Commons Italia) assured us that this agreement (disclaimer included) is compatible with CC-BY-SA.
Cristian
[*] It's also worth noting that the Ministry, with this agreement is not "stretching" the existing law in any way. They also have not required that the photos must be free (because the Italian law doesn't impose such a thing), but it is stated that the photo participating in the contest will be released with CC-BY-SA. The difference is subtle, but the derives from the previous statement.
Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org
While i really appreciate the step done i am wondering if it would be beneficial to have photos with such a usage restriction on commons. Am 14.09.2012 21:19 schrieb "Federico Leva (Nemo)" nemowiki@gmail.com:
rupert THURNER, 14/09/2012 20:54:
Would you be able to give a real world example what you cannot do with such a photo compared to a "standard" commons photo?
Sell a postcard with it.
Nemo
______________________________**_________________ Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments@lists.**wikimedia.orgWikiLovesMonuments@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/**wikilovesmonumentshttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.**org http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org
2012/9/14 rupert THURNER rupert.thurner@gmail.com:
While i really appreciate the step done i am wondering if it would be beneficial to have photos with such a usage restriction on commons.
I have difficulties on seeing any difference between this case and all the pictures with the template {{Personality rights}}. So what's the point?
Cristian
rupert THURNER, 14/09/2012 22:43:
While i really appreciate the step done i am wondering if it would be beneficial to have photos with such a usage restriction on commons.
International users might not care; but, for Italian users living in this regime of (non-copyright) oppression, these restrictions are a big step forward compared to those existing so far under {{soprintendenza}}. Moreover, the latter will provide the former with free as in freedom photos to improve the very poor coverage of Italian cultural heritage on Wikimedia projects and the whole web: yes, it seems something everyone should be happy about. Sure, {{Personality rights}} and such are sometimes annoying restrictions which reduce our (and the reusers') liberty; but this doesn't reduce the fitness to our scope (Wikimedia' and Commons').
Nemo
El 14/09/12 17:40, Cristian Consonni escribió:
2012/9/14 Platonides platonides@gmail.com:
This will likely appear several times at COM:DR, having to be explained. It would be worse if someone tried to do the same with their own photos (I place them under CC-BY-SA but I require a fee) but I don't think they could since they would only have copyright to battle with.
Won't work. If a photographer wants to ask a fee for the use of his/her photos the law which is permitting him to do so is copyright law, i.e. the monopoly (albeit temporary) granted by the state the exclusive rights over the use of a work of art to the author of the work itself. Creative Commons licenses are enforced by the same law, i.e. the author, since he is the person with the right to do so, grants a thirds party the possibility to reproduce, re-use, etc his work. So you can not use the same copyright law to grant a right and negate it at the same time.
The (Italian) law for which you have to request authorization to publish photos of Italian cultural heritage come is *a different law* from copyright law, it has different grounds, namely it is based on the fact that the Italian States thinks it has the right to decide whether the picture of a monument can be published or not, with the aim of protecting the monuments via protecting (the "decency" of) their images.
(...)
That's why I said "I don't think they could".
It's interesting to note that after reading the first mail I thought that the fee was to be paid to the owner (ie. the Soprintendenza would say if you need to pay a fee to the monument owner or not). Rereading it now, I think I was wrong and you needed to pay it to the Soprintendenza.
Still, those photos are not completely free.
Disagree, they are completely free regarding the subject of copyright, and that's why the lawyers we contacted (which are people from Creative Commons Italia) assured us that this agreement (disclaimer included) is compatible with CC-BY-SA.
Cristian
I was refering to «free» in a greater scope, not just in copyright terms. Applying a similar test to those of DSFG:
After a shipwreck in a storm, you arrive to an island isolated from the rest of the world, far from any commercial route, and there's little to no hope of return. However, there's a prosperous nation there where you get shelter. The inhabitants are sympathetic to you, and very interested in the news you carry about the outside world. Luckily, your laptop is intact, as are your solar panels. You also happen to have a copy of Wikipedia stored in your hard disk, which turns out to be very handy for explaining the science and inventions from the external world. You are soon proclaimed as the most erudite person of the island. Sadly, your single computer does not escale to making the vast knowledge stored on it available for all the people living in that country. Electricity or computers are completely unknown there, so there's no way of copying the wikipedia files. Therefore, you and other intellectuals embark in a lengthy process for converting all wikipedia articles into their printing press system, making books which are to be sold by a nominal fee. Their publishing process is very advanced, and your group very soon discovers a way to embed color images (which are very common on their books) from your computer, by holding a specially treated rice paper to the screen, which capture the image (albeit with a quality loss) and then serves as a master copy. This way, the articles of the encyclopædia being published are enriched with the hundred of images and diagrams that were stored with your offline copy. Sadly, no photos of Italian monuments could be included, since it's impossible for any of you to reach the soprintendenza.
Platonides, your example won't work. You may just give the hard disk (and the crank for giving it some juice :-) ) to an inhabitant. She is not an Italian citizen, and she is not in Italy: therefore international laws apply, not Italian one. The pics may be printed at leisure.
ciao, .mau.
(please remember that copyright is an *international* law: this is why cc-by-sa-nc would not work)
Platonides, 14/09/2012 23:42:
Sadly, no photos of Italian monuments could be included, since it's impossible for any of you to reach the soprintendenza.
I thought this ending made the whole narration a sarcastic tale? Of course you can't reach the soprintendenza, but most importantly the soprintendenza can't reach you.
Your example rather proves the value of uploading such images to Commons: whatever language the shipwrecked person speaks or downloaded Wikipedia in (from kiwix.org in ZIM format I suppose?), the backup will easily include all MiBAC-authorised photos because 1) Italians can upload them in the first place without breaking the law, 2) Commons can host them because they're free, 3) all Wikipedias can use them directly rather than hoping for them to be somewhere in the web or on it.wiki and uploading them locally.
Nemo
On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 1:18 PM, WereSpielChequers < werespielchequers@gmail.com> wrote:
Doesn't that make it a non-commercial license, i.e. CC-BY-SA NC
Commons doesn't allow images which are only licensed for non-commercial use.
yes, it is a non-commercial license (or to say it better, a not-necessarily-non-commercial license: sopraintendenze may always waive the fee, what is mandatory at least for Italian people is asking for the permission;
but no, it is not a CC-BY-SA-NC. The whole point of Creative Commons is that the owner of the work relinquish some (or all) of *his/her* rights; but the provisions of Codice Urbani are rights *of another entity* (the Italian government). So there are two different tracks, as legalese in CC licenses recognises: think at http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_logo.svg .
ciao, .mau.
This is wonderful, Andrea! Congrats to Wikimedia Italia
El 13/09/2012, a las 07:56, Andrea Zanni zanni.andrea84@gmail.com escribió:
Dear all, Great news from Italy! After over one year of talks between Wikimedia Italia and MiBAC, the Italian Ministry of Cultural and Artistic Heritage (MiBAC is a quasi-acronym from its official Italian denomination "Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali"), we have managed to sign an agreement which will allow us to participate to Wiki Loves Monuments in a much broader way that we could before. MiBAC explicitly states in the agreement that «the Ministry considers particularly useful, in order to promote awareness of such goods [the ones managed by the Ministry - note that this is different from "owned by the Ministry", see below], the production of specific items about them on wikipedia.org, in all its languages, and the publication of images on Wikimedia Commons, at the site http://commons.wikimedia.org.%C2%BB Moreover, it will explicitly ask to its local branches to give us the list of "lesser" monuments, those which are not usually known but are nonetheless beautiful... and poorly described in Wikipedia. Italian law however puts some constraints unrelated to copyright issues: this means that the pictures uploaded must bear the the template {{Italy-MiBAC-disclaimer}}[1]. The text of the disclaimer is shown below; to understand what it actually means we put up this text, which provides a bit of context about the history of the agreement and the Italian law. As you know, Wiki Loves Monuments started in 2010, and went European in 2011. Wikimedia Italy wanted to participate to that edition, but we discovered a great obstacle to the project, a law called "Codice Urbani"[2]. "Codice Urbani" is an Italian law which states, among other provisions, that to publish pictures of "cultural goods" (meaning in theory every cultural and artistical object/place) for commercial purposes it is mandatory to obtain an authorization from the local branch of the Ministry of Arts and Cultural Heritage, the "Soprintendenza"[3]. The Superintendence can require the payment of a fee; moreover, the authorization granted is will be for the requester only (usually a publishing company) and only for a given publication. Personal use and use for study and research are allowed without a request for authorization. You certainly noticed that Codice Urbani is problematic for a smooth realization of Wiki Loves Monuments. In fact, I can make pictures of monuments I can give up my copyright allowing others to copy my image without requiring my explicit permission; but the Codice Urbani says that if I want to publish those picture a fee can be requested to me, so anyway a third party can't make profit out of my picture without asking in advance an authorization to the Soprintendenza. This issue is completely independent from any issue regarding copyright: Coliseum and the Leaning Tower fall (no pun intended) under Codice Urbani. So we were in difficulty in organizing a photocampaign in Italy and asking people to (potentially) break the Italian law, since the unclear points where many. We started challenging this problems in Summer 2011: we contacted people from the Ministry, we set up a draft of the project, we met once in Rome to speak with high delegates. To make a long story short, we managed to obtain the promise of receiving the lists of the monuments which could be photographed: but then things slowed down, our contacts were moved to other offices, and the Ministry himself (who was aware of the project) was replaced or political reasons (unrelated to WLM, of course). Thus, we could not participate in WLM 2011. In December 2011 we started working out a new strategy: meanwhile, as you can imagine, endless discussions were made in our mailing lists. We contacted NEXA Center for Internet and Society[4a], an institution from the University of Turin which supports and promotes Creative Commons: they are actually the official contact for Creative Commons in Italy! We decided to allocate some resources and hired Deborah De Angelis[4b], a lawyer specialized in Creative Commons and cultural heritage. Deborah, who is based in Rome, started contacting again the (renewed) Ministry of Cultural Heritage, proposing a draft for an agreement between the Ministry and Wikimedia Italia. Several months of discussions and bouncing of documents followed. In January Wikimedia Italy also hired a Project Manager for Wiki Loves Monuments, Emma Tracanella. Emma started developing and pursuing another tactic developed by WMI to get permission for taking pictures of monuments: asking directly the authorization to specific municipalities and institutions. In fact, it is the "owners" of a monument who have the right to authorize pictures of it. It's Codice Urbani itself which gives them these rights, indeed. Thus, we had two strategies: one top-down, that is discussing with the MiBac to obtain an agreement clearly stating that we could organize Wiki Loves Monuments in Italy, and explaining which were the boundaries of the law (the dream here would have been to change the law itself, but we would have needed to bring the issue in Parliament, and more urged matters pressed); the other bottom-up, that is asking the permissions to the single institutions. Note that the bottom-up strategy meant having to deal with 8000+ different municipalities, endless cultural institutions, uncountable churches (every parish priest has the right for is own parish, unless this is in some special list from the Ministry). We let you imagine the complexity of the landscape that was opening in front of us: it was a nightmare, but at least it could give us some "free" monuments. Emma started making calls to everyone who could give us authorization for taking photo of monuments. We started spreading the word, calling friends of friends for help, starting a blog (our wikilovesmonuments.it), begging for authorization everywhere. We had a great ally in APT Services, the Tourist office for Emilia Romagna, with which we already partnered in the past for some Wikipedia-related projects; they organized meetings with mayors and regional politicians. In the end, we reached different regions and provinces, and several municipalities (here there is a list[5]). Our list of monuments counts in hundreds, and it's still improving everyday (here there is a map of the lists[6]). A drop in the ocean, if you think at the enormous Italian cultural heritage: but it is all we managed to get. This up to yesterday. Today, we had finally an answer from MiBAC, and it was positive. The Ministry signed an agreement with Wikimedia Italia saying that: the Ministry, with the aim of promoting the knowledge of the Italian Cultural Heritage, finds useful that the monuments have an article on Wikipedia with photographs. (yes, it is *actually* saying that). the Ministry will send an internal communication asking to every Soprintendenza to send us a list of the monuments they control, along with a permission to take photos of them. Pics of these monuments can be released in CC-BY-SA, in the sense that the maker of the photograph can relinquish his own rights; no fee is needed to be paid to the monuments' owners by the photographer if he does not want to use them for commercial purposes. As part of the agreement, we however have to add a disclaimer to the pictures; the one in {{Italy-MiBAC-disclaimer}}. The text of the advice is shown below: This image reproduces a property belonging to the Italian cultural heritage as entrusted to the Italian government. Such images are regulated by Articles 106 et seq. of the Italian Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape under Legislative Decree No. 42, dated January 22, 2004, and its subsequent amendments. These regulations, unrelated to copyright regulations, establish a system for the protection Italy’s historic and artistic heritage and its standards of dignity. Among other things, these regulations provide for the payment of a concession fee by those who intend to benefit economically from reproductions of property belonging to the Italian cultural heritage. Reproduction of this image is permitted for personal use or study. A further authorization by the Italian Ministry of Heritage and Culture is required for reproduction for any other purpose, and particularly for commercial use. Such commercial use includes, but is not limited to, use in (a) any form of advertising, and (b) any company name, logo, trademark, image, activity, or product. Our lawyers (which are people from Creative Commons Italy) assure us that this license is compatible with CC-BY-SA, because the provisions of the license, which deals only with intellectual propriety, is saved and the limitation occurs on another, different, level. In other words, the photographer releases the picture in CC-BY-SA, the Ministry allows to put it on Commons waiving its own right to get a fee, but Codice Urbani keeps staying in force, protecting the pics from automatic commercial use by third parties. To be more explicit, please have a look the the section 5 of the Legal Code of Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-3.0 [7], which we are quoted below: boldface is ours. 5. Representations, Warranties and Disclaimer Unless otherwise mutually agreed to by the parties in writing, licensor offers the work as-is and makes no representations or warranties of any kind concerning the work, express, implied, statutory or otherwise, including, without limitation, warranties of title, merchantibility, fitness for a particular purpose, noninfringement, or the absence of latent or other defects, accuracy, or the presence of absence of errors, whether or not discoverable. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties, so such exclusion may not apply to you As you may see, it's true that the author of the photo cannot vouch for the merchantability of the images, since this is not a right of his/her; but CC-BY-SA explicitly takes into account that case. To the best of our knowledge, this agreement is the first one of its kind in Italy, and sees an official recognition of the existence of Creative Commons licenses; moreover, it is a necessary step towards new regulations recognizing the importance of the free dissemination of information about the cultural and artistic heritage, which cannot just be "museum stuff". We are thrilled to see what will come out, and how Italians will answer to this challenge. We are very proud to have obtained this. Feel free to ask us anything you think relevant, we'll do what we can to answer. We are also open to prepare some FAQ, if we see the need for them. Best regards, Cristian and Andrea on behalf of the Wiki Loves Monuments organizing committee in Italy
References [1] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Italy-MiBAC-disclaimer [2] http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codice_Urbani [3] http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soprintendenze [4a] http://nexa.polito.it/ [4b] http://nexa.polito.it/fellows [5] http://www.wikilovesmonuments.it/istituzioni/ [6] http://www.wikilovesmonuments.it/monumenti/lista-monumenti/ ; also on wiki at: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progetto:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2012/Monumenti [7] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode _______________________________________________ Wiki Loves Monuments mailing list WikiLovesMonuments@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikilovesmonuments http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org
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