Thanks WSC,
Though our recent experience in UK chapter AGMs is that they neither
have hustings nor honestly welcomed "debates" for a few years now. As
this year's AGM will be a yet to be detailed virtual event, it's even
more unlikely that sufficient of the 500{{cn}} registered members will
take part actively to make meaningful hustings, or more than 10% of
the members to be engaged enough to vote on anything even if enabled
remotely using more than passive broadcast methods.
With regard to the British Museum, as Mike notes, some of us have been
educating through to lobbying them about better copyright policies for
a decade, frequently with individual curators as supportive of better
policies as we are. It is no coincidence that my own photograph of an
object in the BM collection is the lead image on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyfraud. Facts are facts, those of us
passionate about open knowledge should not be so worried about an
institutional or middle-management focus on PR that we fail to be
openly critical in plain English about their commercial choices that
seriously damage open knowledge or the free use of public domain
works.
Fae
On Thu, 30 Apr 2020 at 12:21, WereSpielChequers
<werespielchequ...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Andy makes some important points.
>
> We know that even if editors in the UK respect what the British Museum is
> doing and don't upload those images to Commons or Wikipedia; where they are
> public domain images under US law, it is just a matter of time before someone
> in the movement, anywhere in the world, uploads any of those British Museum
> images that are of old two D objects to Commons as Public Domain images that
> can be used without attribution to the photographer or the institution.
>
> Of course large parts of the British Museum collection would involve images
> of three d objects. In those case we can't use the BM images, but outside of
> lockdown people can either go there and take photos, or if you can't get
> yourself to the British Museum with a camera, make a request via the London
> Meetup, and if the object is on display we can get results such as at
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miniature_altarpiece_(WB.232)
>
>
> The chapter remains in the awkward position of liaising with institutions
> that regard it as acceptable to claim a non commercial copyright on out of
> copyright material, and of in effect advocating for a position at variance
> with that of the wider movement.
>
> One option that the chapter could consider would be to shift policy and
> instead start to diplomatically lobby UK Museum's to, as Andy put it, stop "
> trying to appropriate rights that belong to us all." Perhaps those on this
> list who are still members of the chapter might consider raising this for a
> debate at the next AGM?
>
> Regards
>
> Jonathan
>
>
>
> On Wed, 29 Apr 2020 at 21:06, Andy Mabbett <a...@pigsonthewing.org.uk> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, 29 Apr 2020 at 11:43, Owen Blacker <o...@blacker.me.uk> wrote:
>> >
>> > That it's a non-commercial licence is really disappointing, but that's
>> > still a little better than nothing…
>>
>> With the emphasis on the "little". There are two things wrong with
>> this, which we as a movement (and individually) need to challenge; at
>> very reasonable opportunity.
>>
>> Firstly, there's the way they're spending public money making non-free
>> original content. we need to persuade GLAMs - and lobby funders - that
>> such material should be freely reusable.
>>
>> But far more troubling is the attempt to claim copyright in works
>> whose copyright - if the work didn't pre-date copyright completely -
>> expired decades or centuries ago. The latter means, in effect that
>> they are trying to appropriate rights that belong to us all.
>>
>> --
>> Andy Mabbett
>> @pigsonthewing
>> http://pigsonthewing.org.uk
>>
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