[Foundation-l] National Portrait Gallery

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 5:26 PM, John at Darkstar<vacuum at jeb.no> wrote:
> If we forget about politics and who-did-what, what is the common grounds
> between "us" and "them"? To me it seems like they want us to use their
> material, but that they are scared to let go of a possible income. This
> seems fairly similar to the Galleri NOR -case.
>
> Would it be possible for us to define an acceptable resolution that is
> also acceptable for them? They have a lot more material available and to
> me the whole thing seems to be less than optimum for both parties. They
> want to get the material known, but also have the option to sell high
> resolution versions. We want to illustrate articles, but have no need to
> sell our copies, neither do we need highres versions - we infact
> downsample the versions.

Downsampling inline on the articles, yes, but a lot of people do click
all the way through to see larger images.  If it wasn't useful to
people to see the larger images then they wouldn't have been online in
the first place.

It's also worth noting that the large image we have are actually
small... and not especially suitable for careful examination or making
actual size prints. For those purposes the NPG most likely has images
with about 100x the number of pixels, at least if they are using a
large format scan-back like everyone else.

I've been in museums which provided loupes on cantilevers for
examining the works. As I recall the NPG in London will loan you a
magnifying glass for a couple of dollars.


I'm not saying this to argue that there can't be a reasonable
arrangement— only contradicting the position that there is some lower
resolution which is just as good.  The resolution of diminishing
returns would be something significantly larger than what we have
today.  So agreements have to be on the basis of mutual benefit,
rather than on sufficiency as I really doubt there is some middle spot
that the involved parties can agree is completely sufficient.



On Fri, Jul 17, 2009 at 5:37 PM, David Gerard<dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> So: what would everyone here like to see in a compromise, that
> addresses the concerns of all sides? What makes the NPG happier and
> more secure, and will fly with WMF and with the Wikimedia community?

An ideal resolution would:

Provide the public with the greatest access to the works which can be
agreed on. Access both quantity, quality, and broadness of character.
(I.e. Broadness: Decorating my cubical in historic works of art is
something both the NPG and the WMF should support and endorse, and
arguably it in both of our charters although a bit slantwise)

Maximize the probability of the information contained in the artwork
surviving. (If the NPG has a severe fire, will the highest resolution
digital copies be destroyed along with the paintings themselves?  The
digital medium has some wonderful properties for historical that are
usually lost when extensive control is exerted)

Would take advantage of the parties strengths. (Wikimedia's enormous
amount of traffic, the Wikimedia communities ability to synthesize
meaningful education works from raw material, and Wikipedia's ability
to place the works in a larger intellectual context, and the NPG's
large collection of historical artefacts, their established efforts to
digitize and contextualize those works in a set of narrower but more
detailed contexts).

Would respect the parties mutual requirements:

Would not impose DRM on the Wikimedia projects as has been suggested
by the NPG (a violation of the content licensing).

(*) Would not make the Wikimedia Foundation or its community of user
appear to endorse or support the assertion of copyright on exacting
reproductions of clearly public domain works. Wikimedia (as far as I
can tell) and many of its users believes that it would be a
significant harm to the public and a blow to the fundamental nature of
copyright if that kind of loophole were allowed to exist.

For the NPG, I'm not sure what their requirements are: The FOI request
reflected only ~15k/yr in online licensing income, and at least some
portion of that must come from the licensing of works which are
entirely under copyright still.  We could certainly find some ways to
help make up that amount. But it would seem to me that their online
program must already be operating at a loss.  More information about
their goals is clearly required.


We could probably find people to sponsor or perform a substantial
amount of digitization work and leave the NPG to their own images, if
the access were permitted.  I expect that the NPG is quite happy (and
already easily funded) for doing their own doing their own
digitization and enjoy the level of quality control that it provides.
I'm doubtful that we could offer anything attractive to them on this
matter.


To meet (*) I suspect there may also need to be a degree of dealing
with "the cats out of the bag" on the current images.  Even if there
was an agreement to use an alternative copy of some sort, we couldn't
stop users from continuing to upload the images we already have
without adopting the NPG's interpretation of the law and accepting the
applicability of UK law to US contributors and Wikimedia itself. (As
well as accepting the UK as a copyright litigation haven).    So I'm
pretty confident that any agreement would likely need to be a forward
moving one.  Difficult when everyone has a sour taste.