[WikiEN-l] NYT: Wikipedia May Be a Font of Facts, but It’s a Desert for Photos

[Carcharoth]

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 5:06 PM, geni<geniice at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/7/20 Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com>:
>> It would be interesting to compare why low-resolution is considered OK
>> here, to support and encourage the revenue stream of a professional
>> photographer, but not in the case of the National Portrait Gallery
>> (where the underlying works are public domain), and the revenue stream
>> is (in theory) supporting the digitisation costs.
>>
> Because the photographers copyright claim is legit. Under US law the
> National Portrait Gallery's isn't.

Not copyright. Revenue stream.
Freedom. Not beer money.

Something being in the public domain doesn't mean you can't make money
out of it. The question is whether you are restricting access by
others to the originals. If the NPG gave people the option of either:

a) Buying our high-resolution images to fund our digitisation program
and our general cultural mission (because the government says we have
to generate some of our own funding).

Or:

b) Allowing access for professional scanners and photographers to
obtain scans to release under a free license.

What would the response be?

This strikes at the heart of why some people do react as if people are
stealing something from the NPG. In effect the NPG are restricting
access (and in a sense 'stealing' the public domain), and in another
sense, people are 'stealing' by piggybacking on the efforts of the NPG
who digitised the images. Ethics, here, not copyright.

The NPG almost certainly wouldn't agree to (b), but if they did, what
would the case be then? "Oh, we can't afford to pay for people to come
and scan the pictures, so we will just use the ones you've produced
instead." Or would Commons and the WMF organise a parallel scanning
effort that would duplicate what had already been done? Seems a waste
of time and resources, doesn't it? But when someone says "there is a
photograph here of something on public display, can we use it?", and
the answer is "no, the photograph is copyrighted, go and take your own
photograph", we see the same duplication of effort and resources.

Carcharoth