[WikiEN-l] Copyright question

[Carcharoth]

On Wed, Jul 15, 2009 at 2:16 PM, Carcharoth<carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:

<snip>

Some more blogs on this raised some interesting points. First I'll
quote what I said earlier, and then comment after it.

> Take a moment to think about what is involved in cataloguing and
> digitising a collection like that. I know the US public institutions
> have done just that (think Library of Congress), but it is certainly
> not cheap, not easy and not quick.
>
> I would hope it involved a lot more than pointing a camera at a
> portrait on a wall, even if you are mounting it on a tripod and using
> infrared technology as well. And where do you start on access to the
> library collections? If they are properly funded (not a given, I
> know), there is likely to be an array of hi-tech scanning machines and
> technologies used to produce the hi-resolution images. Think art
> restoration and preservation techniques. And a wide range of media and
> scanning techniques developed for those different media. 3D scanning
> techniques, scanning techniques for light-sensitive materials, ways to
> scan large portraits (the really big ones can be many feet across and
> be very heavy). Even producing a flatbed scan of a normal print or
> negative requires careful cleaning and scanning and then
> post-processing of the scan itself.

Now look at this blog and the comments on it:

http://lawclanger.blogspot.com/2009/07/its-not-often-that-copyright-cases-get.html

The comments that do a much better of job of explaining what I was
trying to say above are here:

http://lawclanger.blogspot.com/2009/07/its-not-often-that-copyright-cases-get.html?showComment=1248071156102#c5694161467475271524

http://lawclanger.blogspot.com/2009/07/its-not-often-that-copyright-cases-get.html?showComment=1248077825200#c4475862728183075889

http://lawclanger.blogspot.com/2009/07/its-not-often-that-copyright-cases-get.html?showComment=1248093363247#c1041052715360562279

http://lawclanger.blogspot.com/2009/07/its-not-often-that-copyright-cases-get.html?showComment=1248116087988#c6131818993353533685

Some quotes to give a taste of the arguments being put forward:

"A large format camera with a betterlight scanback is rigidly attached
to a display platform where the art is placed, along with the
lighting. All the camera movements, focus, etc, are fixed except a
rail allows the camera to be adjusted to match the measured depth of
the frame. Images of a calibration target are taken, then the art.
Basically scanner turned inside out and scaled up to a large size."

"there's actually quite a lot of skill required in using the system.
Each image require individual calibration, and an appropriate lighting
direction needs to be chosen. You wouldn't light a Turner in the same
way as a Van Gogh. So the NPG can argue that skill has been required."

"[C]opying technology has reached a stage now where exact replicas of
works of art can be created. The resulting digital files that drive
the 3D printers, or CNC machines to reproduce the work may be the
culmination of months of work and the expenditure of £10000s."

"The HP system involves custom calibration and lighting to produce a
version of the image that gives a remarkably accurate 3D image of the
paint surface and texture; it takes a lot of time (a decade for the
permanent collection at the NG I think), costs a lot of money, needs
training of the operators and is used as the basis of the print on
demand system in the National Gallery shop."

Also here:

http://robmyers.org/weblog/2009/07/wikipedia-against-gallery-copyright-overreach.html#comment-2826

"Suppose the Van Gogh museum did produce high quality copies of their
collection, such copies would be a colossal public benefit, as would
the cost of creating the digitization. Now say those files leak out,
should the museum have any ability to stop someone from using those
files to produce and sell exact copies, and if they don't, if someone
can just snag their production data, what incentive do they have in
make the artifacts available in the first place? And so we return to
the NPG. Just how do they protect their investment in producing their
digital files?"

These issues of how to fund digitisation projects and what protection
should be afforded, if any, are not going to go away.

Carcharoth