On 24/09/2010 18:29, geni wrote:
- Get the lawyers to find something splitting the difference between
CC-by-NC and CC-by-SA. The British Museum and other major institutions can live with non-commercial use of their stuff. We cannot. CC is therefore still too crude.
Such licenses exist (crown copyright would technically qualify). We can't use them and then tend to be legally messy. In practice when dealing with 3D collections we can generally produce pretty good results ourselves. Admittedly this takes time but the quality at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_the_World_in_100_Objects
is improving.
Scenario: the world's leading museums are getting their act together, and putting together a subscription site where we'll have to go to explore their collections online. Top academic libraries will have to find the money. We want to put a counter-proposal, and have two strong cards to play:
* What they are doing will just perpetuate the argument against the nineteenth-century western collections, because it's the privileged who'll be able to access easily the site that documents them. * We have the Bates-Guffett Foundation lined up to finance an opening-up of at least images of the collections. * Point three - what is it? By some sort of lateral thinking compared to where we are now, we need to produce a concept, perhaps involving an independent curating body, microtransactions, fast remote loading, legal innovario ... whatever it is, images to appear in Wikipedia and other "free content" places as a type of "fair use", not involving the current premise that we need a local copy on our own servers under the licensing arrangement we use for everything else. Some practical arrangement that can produce sponsored public service usage of images of unique objects, without simply asking the museums to drop an income stream without compensation (see the thread title).
Charles