2011/9/27 Harel Cain harel.cain@gmail.com:
We can have our fresh and promising Wikimedian-in-Residence there raise the issue with museum staff. This news took us by surprise. Apparently, the Google-IMJ project is quite a bit more than simple scanning of the material, it involves more hypertextual contextual work.
Please, a more friendly and less sarcastic attitude will certainly help here. The museum has been showing a great deal of good faith in its GLAM cooperation with us, and doesn't deserve this kind of attitude.
We certainly don't want to run into a collision course with the Museum over this thing. The Dead Sea Scrolls are perhaps the museum's most important item on display, and a world-class cultural heritage item. Which means that as much as it matters to us, it will matter greatly to the museum, this is not some secondary work of art which they might turn a blind eye to copyright infringement on. We (WMIL) will look into the matter.
In practical terms, what they can do? Wikipedia is hosted in US. Therefore, for a successful takedown, the museum must sue in US.