---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com Date: Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 10:42 AM Subject: [Commons-l] NPG issue - other interested parties To: Wikimedia Commons Discussion List commons-l@lists.wikimedia.org

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com Date: 2009/7/17 Subject: NPG issue - other interested parties To: Open Rights Group open discussion list org-discuss@lists.openrightsgroup.org

Apposite comment on this issue on my blog - other QANGOs that try to own the public domain:

http://davidgerard.co.uk/notes/2009/07/13/has-anyone-been-in-touch-with-the-...

=== Roger Pearse Says: July 17th, 2009 at 1:41 pm

Mr Webb,

Your comments on the British Library are very apposite, if a little misconceived.

The British Library has refused, solidly, for 10 years, to my certain knowledge, to digitise its collection of medieval manuscripts. It also refuses to allow almost anyone to access them. Since it is based in London, even people like myself who DO have clearance cannot in fact go there very often. I asked them to digitise 3 manuscripts, each of 100 pages. I could photograph them in a day. They are quite sturdy.

They refused to do so. I offered to photograph them. They refused. They agreed to photograph them only if I paid them £8,000. That’s £20 per click of the camera. And they wouldn’t put them online then. They offered to allow ME to put them online, so long as I paid them £500 a year for the rest of my life.

Yet the manuscripts have never been photographed at all! So, as you remark, some fool could go in and steal pages. But the BL view is better that, than that the images should appear on the web.

Preservation means photography, and the creation of many copies of the images. To obstruct this is criminal.

So why does the BL do this? Because they are making money by selling crude black-and-white (not even monochrome) images to scholars trying to make use of the texts at massive prices (hundreds of pounds).

This seems to be the same motive as the NPG. Short-term greed, and the hell with the public interest. ===

- d.

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