I have tried to focus my comments on "economic harm" more narrowly and included a portion of Richard Rinehart's post on museum being caught in the middle of this dispute as it is relevant to how various parts of the academic community see each other (and who is making a profit).
Julie Beamer wrote:
<snip>
> On the issue of "obviously no commercial value" I must plead ambiguity in myBut the question remains do museum actually gain any real benefit from restricting access? I don't deny that such images could be used to sell books, handheld computers or other products. What I am trying to focus on is not the commercial price of the product but the expected return the museum can expect for use of an image.
> posting. What I intended was to say that the items in question would primarily
> be of research interest to scholars and would not be reproduced by themselves
> as a commercial product. Images of the tablets themselves lack the commercial
> potential of Danielle Steele novels for example.No, but the images can be used in a commercial product, such as "The
History of Writing", "Life in Ancient Egypt" or some such entity.
<snip>
> Certainly images could be used in a way that "yields some money for some entity
> other than the museum or collection repository" but is the economic harm from
> that severe enough to deny scholars easy access to such materials?Here I have another question, what's "easy access"? Some institutions,
I know, are very restrictive. Mine isn't. If we own an object, and a
professor/scholar wants to make a photograph for use in the classroom,
we allow it, and do not charge (we will charge if we have to hire the
photographer, which is the case with most of our requests).
By easy access I mean either the scholars being permitted to make photographs/images of objects and then being free to share them non-commercially with colleagues or the museum taking the initiative to make images of materials (my personal interest is in papyri and cuneiform tablets but would include other inscribed materials) available.
<snip>
Economic harm is in the eye of the beholder. If the income stream fromThe absence of any posting with hard figures about revenue from licensing the images of papyri and cuneiform tablets illustrates my point about the absence of economic harm by allowing free circulation of scholarly quality images of papyri or cuneiform tablets. Are there any museums that can claim from such obscure (to the general public) materials that they derive even one-tenth of one percent of their operating budget from commercial licensing? I don't have access to museum budgets but am willing to rely upon reports of such income by members of this list.
licensing and sales pays for a part time assistant, and the income
stream dries up because the images that used to be sold are now
available on the internet and elsewhere, that part time assistant now
doesn't have a job. That person would find the economic harm very
severe indeed.
re: copyright<snip>
You raise an important point but I think most scholarsI am sure scholars who claim copyright on photographs are not evil and I don't recall suggesting that they were either evil or selfish. I would suggest that the focusing on a notion of "rights" in the case of scholarly materials as though such material has any substantial commercial value prevents the exchange of information upon which scholars rely for their work. And even if it were granted under some no-intellectual contribution but sweat-with-a-camera doctrine that they had legal rights in that regard, how should that affect the museum granting other scholars access to make their own images? What I am suggesting that that museums should not make it possible for scholars to obtain the sole images of objects which leads (IMHO) directly to the sad situation Amalyah Keshet is now addressing. But for granting rights to only selected scholars the museum would have copies of such items to offer itself and that would (hopefully) have a very negative impact on the commercial CD-ROM product.
> would prefer to accomodate their colleagues rather than claim copyright on an
> image (assuming the source is properly attributed). (Note the last statement is
> personal opinion and there may be scholars who would claim copyright on images,
> with or without attribution in future use.)There are; I've met them. They are very nice people, not evil, not
selfish. But they hold they have rights to income from a photograph,
just as the author of a book or article has rights. And they're right,
IMHO.
The other topic that I think should be addressed in this forum arises
from the reply of Richard Rinehart who suggested that museums are really
caught in the middle of this dicussion, or in his own words:
The second reason museums can't be typecast is that museums are often portrayed in sister communities (such as academic community or in the recent federal "conference on fair use") as the outright owners and arbiters of their collections and all access and intellectual property rights. As was pointed out, this is often not true, not only with living artists, but donors an estates may as well apply contractual restrictions and museums simply cannot afford to pass on acquiring some of these objects (most of these are not plunder, but just contractually or legally restricted object). Museums are really in the middle of all this - we have some power in deciding access to some images, but for many of our collections we suffer as much as the scholar from restrictive interpretation of intellectual property law!
It seems interesting to me that museums, scholars, academic publishers and libraries probably all share the compliant about being caught in the middle and that others in the scholarly world don't really understand "their issues." Part of the common problem shared by all is what I would term the "obsession" with a notion of rights and economic benefits. I have a very high opinion of museums, libraries and most academic publishers and their respective roles in the scholarly enterprise but I think trying to adopt current economic models does all partners in that enterprise a disservice. I would prefer a "gift culture" model which Eric Raymond cites in "Homesteading the Noosphere" (http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/homesteading.html). Please don't be mislead by the term "gift culture." The model advocated by Raymond has been adopted by such companies as Netscape, IBM, Oracle and other notables of the capitalist world. It also takes no position on intellectual property rights.Scholars, museums, libraries and academic publishers share interests that I think could be advanced by more communication between all these groups and a little less suspicion that someone somewhere is making money that rightfully belongs to (fill in the blank). I suspect that we would find that we have all been laboring under misconceptions concerning our partners in this enterprise and that our needs and goals would be better served if we collaborated rather than protected ourselves against imagined exploitation and occassional bad actors. (I am not denying that people take advantage of museums (and others) just that avoidance of that should not become a primary or even secondary concern.)
Patrick
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Patrick Durusau
Information Technology Services
Scholars Press
[email protected]
Manager, ITS
