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A key change at iCommons
If you're not part of the iCommons mailing list, take a look at the letter that Heather Ford, Executive Director of iCommons, sent to the list yesterday:
Dear friends,
At the 2 August iCommons Board Meeting, the board decided to make some difficult but necessary changes at iCommons. It has become clear over the past months that our vision for iCommons is different from the... more
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Freeing the public domain by CC licensing
Alek Tarkowski · Warszawa (Poland) · Jun 01st, 2007 9:15 am · 34 votes · 5 comments
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| An Edward Muybridge cyanotype, probably in the public domain, by Edward Muybridge |
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A group called Public Resource is protesting the actions of American Smithsonian Institute, which at the site SmithsonianImages.SI.Edu asserts copyright to over 6000 historical photographs, many of which are in the public domain according to the activists.
The group has downloaded low quality scans available for free (high quality versions have to be bought from the Smithsonian) and "freed them" - by uploading to Flickr. There, being unable to tag them as public domain material, they have marked them as CC licensed.
This has caused some critical comments to surface, suggesting that it is foolish or even wrong, as in this manner copyright is again asserted over public domain content. I see parallels between such argument and the broader argument that you cannot build an alternative to the copyright regime by using it and thus further strengthening authors' rights (an argument of this sort is made by Niva Elkin Koren in “Creative Commons: A Skeptical View of a Worthy Pursuit”).
I do not agree with it - I would rather say that this is a creative use of the CC licensing mechanism, which assumes a certain fuzziness of this mechanism. People just make do with what they have at hand - in this case, the photos were afterwards marked as "probably Public Domain" - in the tag field.
As a side note, this once again proves the importance of setting up proper licensing infrastructures by content-hosting sites, as more and more often people will post free content there (Internet Archive, you're a brilliant site, but please let me finally use localized CC licenses!).
Last thing - Public Resource makes another interesting point about Flickr. By uploading the photos that are "possibly Public Domain", they hope that there are enough eyeballs among Flickr users to make this a shallow problem.
tags: united states culture public-domain public-resource flickr fuzzy-licensing
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I think a PD choice would be good. But there are problems with it - it's not as easy to check that something is PD, as it is that something is CC licensed...
As for localizing, I think localizations are more important than versions. And yes, they do bloat things. But there are two good reason to use them: a) statistics b) legal side of things. Firstly, it helps a local project to show how the licenses are spreading - and tracking localized license use is at the moment best way to do this, it seems. Secondly, localized licenses were made so that for instance a Pole can license his songs under a Polish license more compatible with the Polish jurisdiction, in which his works will mainly function (though who knows in this global world?). So it's good to give him this option. If we decide that the localization mechanism is too complex for a project like iCommons, then we should start having doubts whether it's useful at all (someone should look, I guess, at what % of people who could use a local license use the generic one)
Alek Tarkowski · Warszawa (Poland) · May 31st, 2007 2:01 am
1 out of 1 person believes this is useful
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