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

[Durova]

Usually I prefer the carrot to the stick and take a very long view.  For
instance, baseball player Babe Ruth had a career that crossed the PD-1923
threshold under US law, and most of the more famous part of that career
happened after 1923.  Right now our featured picture of him is a restored
publicity photo from 1920.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Babe_Ruth2.jpg

This was featured in March and hasn't run on the main page yet.  When it
does I intend to note the traffic statistics for main page views for that
day.  One of the most powerful arguments we have to gain access to more
material under free license is to come to the people who control those
rights and show them how it benefits them.

As the examples collect this becomes very persuasive.  This May, for
instance, ten of the images I restored from Library of Congress archives ran
as Picture of the Day; the main page received a total of over 58 million
page views while they were up.  The New York Times has a circulation of 23
million a month, so each image that gets featured is receiving the
equivalent of front page attention on NYTimes every day for a solid week.

Copyright owners sit up and pay attention when they hear that.

They ought to be lining up for this opportunity.  So far most of them don't
know it exists.  We're working on building tangible examples and momentum.
The great thing is, institutional donors are proving willing to share large
numbers of images in return for a handful of showcase restorations.  After
the NPG threat came out the Tropenmuseum of Amsterdam agreed to donate
100,000 images to Commons.  Negotiations had been underway for a while but
the timing was serendipitous.  We're negotiating further cooperation with
them and with other institutions that we hope to be able to announce soon.

-Durova


On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 10:07 AM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com>wrote:

> You are right Durova. I apologise for sidetracking things there.
>
> Do you have views on how to address situations where we have a free
> pictures of someone when they are very old, but all the pictures of
> them when they were young (and famous) are copyrighted? This can
> happen with sports stars and others. Does the presence of an arguably
> less relevant free picture (of them when they are old) dissuade people
> from attempting to get a free picture that may be more relevant to the
> article (from when they were young)?
>
> Carcharoth
>
> On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 5:58 PM, Durova<nadezhda.durova at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Geni is right; professional photographers who own an uncontroversial
> > copyright over an image are completely within their rights to relicense
> and
> > upload a low resolution version.  That's what the Bundesarchiv did with
> > 100,000 images last December.
> >
> > It doesn't really facilitate those negotiations, either with
> photographers
> > or with cooperative institutions, to sidestep discussion about the
> > cooperative alternatives and refocus on one legal threat.  This is our
> > opportunity to build upon Noam's article and create new synergistic
> > relationships; let's make the most of it.
> >
> > -Durova
> >
> > On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 9:51 AM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com
> >wrote:
> >
> >> 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
> >>
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> >
> >
> >
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