Were the images on Wikimedia actually attributed to the NPG? Does Wikimedia re-write the rights around the images they have reconstructed? Check Jim’s comment on http://www.sydneyobservatory.com.au/blog/?p=1975 If someone wanted to purchase a high res version, print or license, would they know who to ask?

I should really post this to the MCG list, as I think these discussions are better held centrally, but I’m rushing out the door…

As to Dan’s question of whether there were links to NPG, the answer is yes, links to the relevant pages at the NPG website were included from when all these images were first uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

On “circumvention of Zoomify”, I don’t think that’s much of an issue. First of all, Zoomify themselves say very clearly that it’s not a security system, it’s an image viewing system. Coetzee and the others who have used the same method to reconstruct hi-res images from Zoomify tiles are not really circumventing it. If the images are public domain, then it’s legal to capture any given tile (after all, it’s just a screengrab copy of a digital copy of a photograph of a PD painting), legal to collect the tiles for one image and stitch them together (because they’re all PD, so you can do whatever you want with them), and legal to do all that automatically with a script. And what’s more, because of the way image compression works, the end result will actually be a different file than the original that’s underneath Zoomify. So Zoomify isn’t being circumvented, it’s being used to provide hi-res public domain images that happen to be part of a larger whole that can be pieced together.

The breach of contract bit is slightly more compelling, but only just.

The real claim that muddies the waters is database right, which I don’t know much about but which seems like simply an unfortunate bit of law.

I suggested a similar value measuring exercise a while ago on the MCG list:

“What would be fantastic (if unlikely) would be if a museum or gallery agreed to take part in a quantitative study: take one selection of images and hide them away behind watermarking, DRM and thumbnails; take another and make these widely and hugely available via Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, blogging, etc. Offer both sets for purchase in hi-res, then sit back and measure over a period of time. Common sense says that people will steal all the small ones and not bother buying: increasing bodies of evidence show the opposite is actually true.”

I’d love to see such a study…

Perhaps we could persuade someone to expose such data, perhaps finding some way to pay for any significant loss to be insured against, and see what happens…..

Of course, actual metrics might not be really desirable to all. Like the music industry, perhaps there is going to be a significant rear-guard action devoted to protecting existing business models for as long as possible.

There are a lot of vested interests here it seems to me – not necessarily just those directly involved in the actual court case….

Good post BTW – useful roundup of some of the issues and some useful comments besides.

Paul

The thing is (and what I boringly bang on about all the time) – this stuff is *happening*, as this example demonstrates. And I could go out there tomorrow and do the same to any other cultural heritage website, using simple tools I’d built myself or stuff that is freely available like YQL or whatever.

What we as a sector need to come up with are ways to react to the fact that this is inevitable. If stuff is online, people *will* use it, pirate it, copy it, mash it. Maybe our reaction will/should be – “well, balls to this, let’s just *remove* the bloody stuff, then” – and that might be the right answer. But court cases just aren’t, surely…