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

Mon Jul 20 17:50:06 UTC 2009

Click-throughs are much lower, often on the level of 15,000-30,000 during
main page time.  Yet remember these are also generating a steady stream of
attention on the articles themselves.  The one amateur photo of a sound card
is receiving 2,000 direct page views at en:wiki plus an unknown number at
two dozen other language editions of Wikipedia.  Multiply that kind of
attention across a few hundred articles and one year: this has the potential
to become a major source of web traffic to the donating institution.

Bundesarchiv has retained full copyright over high resolution copies of the
images they uploaded (the copyright in these instances is uncontroversial).
Without any actual advertising, readers have been using the source link from
the image hosting page to go to the Bundesarchiv site and purchase high
resolution files.  Their sales of high resolution images have increased
significantly since the donation.

Whether and how to give additional credit is a question I'd rather not
address personally.  Whatever the community decides I'll honor; the salient
point is that even with what we do right now it's a net benefit to
institutions that are smart about it.  We need to communicate to them where
the advantages are, since this is new territory and a radical departure from
how they're used to operating.

Indirectly this helps our position with regard to NPG, because a significant
part of NPG's argument is that WMF is impossible to work with.  Each time we
develop a cooperative relationship with another cultural institution we
prove that part of NPG's argument empirically wrong.  The more this happens,
the more likely NPG is to look silly; the net effect could soften their
approach.  Now is an excellent time to build those relationships because the
current situation is drawing attention to the media side of Wikipedia.

Rather than assault the brick wall we walk around it: work with the
institutions whose copyrights are either uncontroversial, or who don't try
to assert claims over public domain material.  As they benefit, Wikipedia
benefits, and ultimately the others may abandon their claims and get in line
to cooperate with us.

-Durova

On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 10:35 AM, Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com>wrote:

> How many people click through to the image itself? That is where the
> credit is, and the link onwards to the source. Would it help if the
> source (if it was an institution, rather than an individual
> photographer) was automagically credited in the articles, not just on
> the image page? Or would that be the thin end of a wedge and be seen
> as overt advertising? There are some photographer names that will
> never be suitable to be treated this way, but if doing this for
> reputable organisations made it more likely they would donate images,
> is it worth looking at it again?
>
> I also saw a reference somewhere to how having shortcuts dedicated to
> an institutions photographs can avoid nofollow. Something like
> [[:xy:image name.jpg]]? Is that acceptable or not?
>
> Carcharoth
>
> On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 6:27 PM, Durova<nadezhda.durova at gmail.com> wrote:
> > 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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