Apologies - I read this email at the airport in Stockholm on Monday last week, following the Wikimedia Diversity Conference, then promptly forgot about it when I got back to the office.

It's great to see a letter like this signed by so many people, representing a wide range of organisations. As a (hopefully) interesting aside, I was at a roundtable meeting with Baroness Neville-Rolfe late last year to discuss the proposed EU copyright directive. She was amazed and appalled by the idea that institutions would try to claim copyright for a digital copy of an artwork that is out of copyright. Of course when she found out where I was from at the start of the meeting she complained that her Wikipedia profile was out of date and said she would 'get her sons to update it'...she thought I was some sort of tech genius when I had updated it by the end of the meeting ;)

Anyway, back to the question in hand...I have sent a tweet to Bendor Grosvenor this morning briefly explaining what we do and suggesting he gets in touch. I don't seem to be able to send a private message to his Twitter account but hopefully he will respond to the tweet. However I'm sure it can't hurt for him to hear from interested volunteers as well.

Thanks for sharing this.

Lucy

On 14 November 2017 at 09:52, Fæ <faewik@gmail.com> wrote:

On 6 November 2017 at 13:25, Andy Mabbett <andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk> wrote:
> On 6 November 2017 at 11:01, Fæ <faewik@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Volunteers interested in GLAM may be interested to read the letter to
>> The Times today from an extensive list of highly respected academics
>> and museum directors, lobbying against arbitrary image fees charged by
>> UK national museums and their doubtful claims of copyright.
>
> Images of the text of the letter, and full list of signatories, are on Twitter:
>
> https://twitter.com/arthistorynews/status/927434064222662657
>
> https://twitter.com/arthistorynews/status/927434156992290816
>
> Has anyone from WMUK reached out to Bendor Grosvenor, and. or the
> other signatories?
>
> If not, I'd be wiling to contact the former, with whom I have
> previously corresponded.
>
> --
> Andy Mabbett
> @pigsonthewing
> http://pigsonthewing.org.uk

Andy, did you hear back from anyone in the UK chapter in the past
week? I'll be happy to support any initiative involving the Wikimedia
community and Grosvenor's work to put pressure on UK museums to give
free access to high quality public domain images. It would be a
reasonable activity to ask for WMF grant money, should there be any
related volunteer expenses.

Thanks,
Fae
--
faewik@gmail.com https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae

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