On 24/09/2010 18:29, geni wrote:
2. Get the
lawyers to find something splitting the difference between
CC-by-NC and CC-by-SA. The British Museum and other major institutions
can live with non-commercial use of their stuff. We cannot. CC is
therefore still too crude.
Such licenses exist (crown copyright would technically
qualify). We
can't use them and then tend to be legally messy. In practice when
dealing with 3D collections we can generally produce pretty good
results ourselves. Admittedly this takes time but the quality at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_World_in_100_Objects
is improving.
Scenario: the world's leading museums are getting their act together,
and putting together a subscription site where we'll have to go to
explore their collections online. Top academic libraries will have to
find the money. We want to put a counter-proposal, and have two strong
cards to play:
* What they are doing will just perpetuate the argument against the
nineteenth-century western collections, because it's the privileged
who'll be able to access easily the site that documents them.
* We have the Bates-Guffett Foundation lined up to finance an opening-up
of at least images of the collections.
* Point three - what is it? By some sort of lateral thinking compared to
where we are now, we need to produce a concept, perhaps involving an
independent curating body, microtransactions, fast remote loading,
legal innovario ... whatever it is, images to appear in Wikipedia and
other "free content" places as a type of "fair use", not involving the
current premise that we need a local copy on our own servers under the
licensing arrangement we use for everything else. Some practical
arrangement that can produce sponsored public service usage of images of
unique objects, without simply asking the museums to drop an income
stream without compensation (see the thread title).
Charles