[WikiEN-l] Copyright question

[Carcharoth]

On Sat, Jul 18, 2009 at 1:44 PM, Jussi-Ville
Heiskanen<cimonavaro at gmail.com> wrote:
> Carcharoth wrote:
>> One more point:
>>
>> "The British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies has backed
>> the National Portrait Gallery's stance."
>>
>> We don't have an article on BAPLA, but we do have five references to
>> it (article on three of their members, one of the founding members,
>> and the current president). BAPLA is the UK trade association for the
>> picture library industry. Wikipedia is weak on its coverage of trade
>> associations, but if you want to get an idea of the range of picture
>> libraries and agencies in the UK, have a look at the BAPLA website:
>>
>> http://www.bapla.org.uk/
>>
>> "With over 380 member companies, we represent the vast majority of
>> commercial picture libraries and agencies in the UK."
>>
>> "Companies range from small specialists to multinationals,
>> collectively managing in excess of 350 million images, within an
>> industry estimated to be worth over £500m per year in domestic revenue
>> alone."
>>
> Any chance of Wikimedia UK (the chapter) applying
> for a membership of BAPLA? Or would they be considered
> "insufficiently commercial"?

Commons would be the equivalent constituent unit of the Wikimedia
Foundation family, not Wikimedia UK. You may want to look through the
BAPLA list and see if any charities or non-profit organisations are
there - there might well be, as I've never looked through the whole
list, but I suspect that even those ones would be selling their
images, not distributing them for free reuse (or they would be doing a
combination of free distribution and sales). The closest you might
come would be "non-commercial use" (e.g. museums), but that, as has
been made clear at Commons, is insufficiently free.

Are far as who buys images - this goes directly to the core of the
commercial versus free debate (competition?). Encyclopedias like
Encarta (as it was) and Encyclopedia Britannica (as it is) and any
other encyclopedia you see published in a bookshop, or being sold,
will obtain pictures from such sources (and pay for them). Whether any
of them also obtain pictures from Commons, instead of going to
traditional picture library sources (or commissioning a photographer
to take photos), I don't know. The question will likely be whether
they are aware of Commons, and where the best pictures are
(professional photographers do still outstrip Commons in many areas,
but not all).

But please do look through the BAPLA list and see what type of
organisations are members. I'm going to do that now, if they have an
online list, as I would be interested to see which ones we have
articles on.

Carcharoth