I frankly always assumed that most museums
refuse to allow photos for two reasons; and nothing to do with copyrights:
a.- Many years ago (most of you
would not recall, flash photography required magnesium filament containing
flashbulbs, which presented a fire hazard, and or could be ejected by a spring
mechanism from cameras, and cause potential damage; and these were the origin of
the ban; Now that no one uses these dangerous things anymore they needed an excuse
to continue the ban so they claim that flashes can “fade the art”. (Don’t
know the truth of that).
b.- I think it’s far more because
they get to sell the postcards at the book store of their exhibits and CHARGE
for them, and your photos are free.
I suspect this is really about the
almighty buck then rights.
-SJP
From:
wikimedia_nyc-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wikimedia_nyc-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Lee Gillentine
Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2011
10:23 AM
To: New York City Wikimedians
Subject: Re: [Wikimedia NYC]
Free-culture-compliant GLAM awards was: Museum of Art and Design lifts photo
ban
I like that idea.
Personally, I think
patrons taking photos in museums is annoying, and I can understand
the reasons why museums would have a restrictive photo policy. So an
important thing to add to the criteria of rating museum's
"free-culture-compliance" is the availability of images of
items in their collections through some type of creative-commons license.
This, of course, can be weighted differently than actually being able to
take photos inside the museum.
-Lee
On Tue, Jan 4, 2011 at 11:46 PM, Liam Wyatt <liamwyatt@gmail.com> wrote:
(referring to previous
thread: Yes, as several people have described, Wikimedia takes assiduous care
about copyright but cannot be responsible for contracts (formal or implied)
between third-parties e.g. a museum and its patrons.)
Continuing from the link that Sammy posted, http://hyperallergic.com/photopolicy/
this has got me wondering if it really is viable to create a museum photography
policy list... but much more than that...
I think this could work globally, but first I'd like to see if it works in one
area and I think that
What I'm thinking is whether it would be a good idea for Wikimedia to sponsor
the creating of a "free-culture-compliant" rating schema for cultural
organisations. If it worked properly, it could be updated and
"announced" annually with the best organisations in different
categories (National/less than 5 employees/libraries...) winning some kind of
recognition/award.
Where I'm basing this off is Greenpeace's "Guide to Greener
Electronics" which has been running for several years now:
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/toxics/electronics/Guide-to-Greener-Electronics/
The deal with this is to take the public statements/policies of the major tech
organisations and rate them against a set of objective criteria. Each year the
new edition produces quite a bit of publicity e.g. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/oct/27/apple-greenpeace-greener-electronics-rankings
Why I like this system is that it only assesses publicly stated policies which
means it does not require a complicated/expensive assessment system or checking
compliance with those policies. Also, by reducing things to a score it makes it
easy to rate the companies which allows for simple reporting phrases (that the
newspapers and corporate management like) such as "Nokia stays in 1st
place with the same score of 7.5 [green]".
Now, imagine if we could produce an objective list of "free-culture
criteria" that are applicable to cultural organisations (including but not
limited to photographic policies) and give each criterion a weighting. We could
make the list and the assessment process public, as is the wiki way, which
would also enable other organisations to self-assess if they wanted to
(something that cannot be done with Greenpeace's closed system). Then, once an
assessment had been done on all the institutions, we would be in the position
to be able to make a press release saying (for example):
"in 2011 The Brooklyn museum is the most free cultural institution in
What do you think of the idea in general? What do you think of the idea
specifically for NYC in 2011? And...before you think I'm just trying ask you to
do work, I should point out that the WMF has recently hired me on a 1 year
fellowship (not yet announced) to improve our GLAM outreach/collaboration
capacity and therefore I would definitely be up for helping to do the hard work
on such a project.
Sincerely,
-Liam / Witty lama
wittylama.com/blog
Peace, love & metadata
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