This is a difficult problem to solve. Remember that the WMUK was talking with the British Museum way back in 2009/2010, which led to the first Wikipedian in Residence. That they are now using a CC licence is a good step forward, however I suspect the ’NC’ difficulty is related to the existence of https://www.bmimages.com/ .
On the plus side, my photos of the Hoxne Hoard have seen ~400,000 views over the last 10 years through enwp. It’s just a shame that BM is losing out on that traffic for their own imagery.
Thanks, Mike
On 29 Apr 2020, at 21:04, Andy Mabbett andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk wrote:
On Wed, 29 Apr 2020 at 11:43, Owen Blacker owen@blacker.me.uk wrote:
That it's a non-commercial licence is really disappointing, but that's still a little better than nothing…
With the emphasis on the "little". There are two things wrong with this, which we as a movement (and individually) need to challenge; at very reasonable opportunity.
Firstly, there's the way they're spending public money making non-free original content. we need to persuade GLAMs - and lobby funders - that such material should be freely reusable.
But far more troubling is the attempt to claim copyright in works whose copyright - if the work didn't pre-date copyright completely - expired decades or centuries ago. The latter means, in effect that they are trying to appropriate rights that belong to us all.
-- Andy Mabbett @pigsonthewing http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
Wikimedia UK mailing list wikimediauk-l@wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimediauk-l WMUK: https://wikimedia.org.uk