Great talk today from Wikimedia's Liam Wyatt to the cultural sector.
We spent a fair while on the thorny issue of copyright and the controversial position of Wikipedia that a scan or photo of an out of copyright 2D image such as a painting is itself in the public domain. Most institutions maintain that their images of paintings etc have a copyright in the reproduction that they can defend. According to Liam, there is no definitive legal position on this apart from a New York court decision which agrees with Wikipedia.
So what does an organisation like the Tate do if Wikipedia has a high resolution image of theirs without attribution? Apparently nothing. Even trying to replace this image with a properly attributed version on a creative commons license is likely to be stripped of that by Wikipedians who feel quite strongly on this issue. One way around for new images, would be to make a partnership with Wikimedia with links, attribution and metadata but be prepared for someone to strip the Creative Commons license off and mark it public domain. If the image is in copyright, say of a recent painting or photo, then a CC license is likely to be respected. Low resolution on Wikipedia and links to your high resolution commercial images becomes a real possibility.
When the reproduction is of a 3D item (such as Kew's botanical specimens) then the law clearly protects the copyright of the organisation making the image and this will be respected by all.
What about content apart from images? Even without a partnership, footnotes and useful links are really important but one can go further. The British Museum has had a Wikipedian in residence and has made better entries in Wikipedia, leading to more readers and more readers seems to lead at a 1% level of conversion to more link throughs. Another idea was to have a Backstage day with Wikipedians and curators meeting it each other and creating new entries. Definitely something that could be done by lots of other institutions.
Liam has also sent these links over, which you may find interesting:
- if you're keen, the link to the copyright case itself: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp.
- or indeed the UK subsection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp.#Relevance_to_U.K._law
- the original blogpost about the event http://www.wittylama.com/2010/03/the-british-museum-and-me/
- the NY Times article http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/05/arts/design/05wiki.html
- The backstage pass event page: http://uk.wikimedia.org/wiki/Backstage_Pass (and, equally, the frontpage of that website which describes WM-UK)
- the actual page on-wiki where all the work is being housed: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/BM
- the "advice for the cultural sector" page http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM
- the GLAM-WIKI event page which links to the recommendations http://www.wikimedia.org.au/wiki/GLAM
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