Smithsonian pix online: all of them!
p2pnet.net news:- There’s copywrite, then there’s copying. Right?
If the Smithsonian Institution is America’s attic, its photos are the country’s “collective scrapbook,” declares Public.Resource.Org (PRG), a new non-profit group dedicated to creating online public works projects.
SmithsonianImages.SI.Edu is a government e-commerce site holding 6,288 images “of national significance” and every one of them is available online. But at a steep price.
However, thanks to PRG, that’s just changed. Now downloads of the Smithsonian pix won’t cost a cent.
The Smithsonian site is, “breathtaking in scope, with imagery ranging from the historic cyanotypes of Edward Muybridge to historic photos from aviation, natural history, and many other fields,” says PRG, but there’s a problem, and a big one:
A copyright notice which will discourage use of the imagery by the average person, PRG states.
“While personal, non-commercial use is purportedly allowed, it requires a half-dozen clicks before the user is allowed to download a low-resolution, watermarked image,” it goes on. “An image without the watermark and at sufficient resolution to be useful requires a hefty fee, manual approval by the Smithsonian staff, and the resulting invoice specifically prohibits any further use without permission.
“For some photos, the prohibitions go even farther. Aviation photos, for example, come from the National Air and Space Museum (NASM), which states, among other efforts to overreach, ‘even in the absence of copyright, Smithsonian still reserves all rights to image use.’ Are these prohibitions on reuse valid? We showed the NASM copyright page to Yochai Benkler, a Yale law professor. Benkler wrote back that the unilateral and unequivocal claims were ‘nonsense on stilts’.”
So Public.Resource.Org has put the Smithsonian images – all 6,288 of them – online via Flickr.
In a memo, it states:
We have three goals in diffusing this knowledge:
1. The unwieldy archive of low-resolution images on the Smithsonian site makes it hard for people to ascertain the public domain status of the vast majority of these images. By placing the database on sites such as Flickr and in convenient-to-examine PDF and tarball formats, we hope that the Internet commnunity is able to form a better judgement.
2. Some images are clearly in the public domain and of immense public importance. For these images, our nonprofit organization is attempting to systematically purchase these images and place them on the net for use without restriction.
3. We would like to see the Smithsonian adopt a policy for on-line distribution that is much more closely aligned to their mission, focusing on vastly increasing the store of public domain materials available on the Internet.
There are many rewards, but also certain obligations that come with public status. Just as the U.S. Congress could not turn the video from congressional hearings into copyrighted materials, so our Smithsonian Institution lacks the right to encumber the public domain that is our nation’s attic. This is not to say that the Smithsonian cannot obtain funds through creative means, only that the Institution should be cognizant of a special and unique status under our laws. One has only to look at the thriving Smithsonian Associates program or the wildly popular Smithsonian Folkways music site to see that there are many options for government entities to creatively raise funds. Privatizing the public domain is not one of those options.
Stay tuned.
f your Net access is blocked by government restrictions, try Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre for International Studies. Go here for the official download, here for the p2pnet download, and here for details. And if you’re Chinese and you’re looking for a way to access independent Internet news sources, try Freegate, the DIT program written to help Chinese citizens circumvent web site blocking outside of China. Download it here.
rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php | | And use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site
Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local politicians. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance. Don’t just complain. Do something!
May 22nd, 2007 at 9:09 am
I guess when you said
“However, thanks to PRG, that’s just changed. Now downloads of the Smithsonian pix won’t cost a sent.”
you ment that it won’t cost a cent?
Fee free to delete this after you fix it jon
May 23rd, 2007 at 4:19 am
Here you have it, an arm of the american federal government violating the law by placing restrictions on the use of works in the public domain.
Which makes the government no different than the music performance licencesing organizations that routinely license the use of public domain (the Star Spangled Banner, and all latin american national anthems as well, for example) works for profit or the publishers that print a copyright notices on book with public domain works. If in doubt get a music score book with 19th century piano music.
Here in Puerto Rico (a territory of the USA) a dozen persons, mostly musicians, filed a complaint in the Puerto Rico Justice Department againt a music publisher that licenses the use of public domain music (over 110 years old but still very popular in Puerto Rico) and thereatens to sue the users of said music if thy are not paid (pure fraud and extortion here). That was two years ago and the government has said nothing about the complaint.
No wonder the public domain is DEAD.
Rafael Venegas
gvenegas.com