At 11:01 PM 2/5/2003 +0000, you wrote:
At 16:37 05/02/03 -0500, David Green wrote:
materials will only be made available for use by not-for-profit
educational institutions,
It is perhaps invidious to carp about any initiative which seeks to offer
wider access to images but .... mention of not-for-profit educational
institutions raises a wry smile on this side of the Atlantic when some
North American 'not-for-profits' have budgets equivalent to the GDPs of
some developing countries.
The reason seems rather obvious to me. Limiting distribution to verifiable
educational institutions controls the likelihood that some distributed
images will be challenged as infringements. It seems to me that they are
trying to stay well within the limits of the US fair use provisions.
That said, such site-licensed distribution systems place scholars and
writers who remain outside of the institutional system at a severe and
unfair disadvantage. In an era when so many crucial resources are only
practical to use electronically from your own desktop, this tendency is
unconscionable, and, if I may say it, in discord with the intent of the
writers of our constitution.
I would hope that once ArtSTOR's concept becomes accepted by copyright
owners, they will take the courageous step to venture outside of the
educational box to serve the general public. The easiest first step is to
publish the catalogue for general use and include, as does AMICO, free
access to thumbnail images. The next step is to use the public catalogue as
a tool with which to obtain rights to use digital images (just like AMICO)
or order high resolution images for private use (just like CORBIS). And,
additionally, one would hope that images of use to the general public and
scholars, not quite publishable, perhaps, but yet usable by students and
others in papers and in other fair-use applications, will become freely
available (meaning, without charge).
At the same time, images of works in the public domain, available in
reproductions that themselves are in the public domain, should be made
generally available to the public in publishable license-free versions.
After the stinging defeat of the challenge to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term
Extension Act, it is becoming clear that those public domain resources that
do exist should be identified and be made increasingly available. At the
same time fair use must be strengthened at every opportunity.
We can congratulate ArtSTOR for what they aim to accomplish, and support
them in the hope that the program will be so successful that it will be
expanded and broadened along the lines described above.
===========================
Robert A. Baron
mailto:[email protected]
http://www.studiolo.org
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