copyright – Page 2 – Open Objects

Content licences in the UK's cultural heritage sector

An event to be held by Creative Commons Salon London on November 20 will feature a discussion on 'open content licences in the UK cultural heritage sector':

This time round we'll be joined by Jordan Hatcher, a lawyer and legal consultant specialising in intellectual property and technology law, who will present and discuss his work on a new report entitled "Snapshot study on the use of open content licences in the UK cultural heritage sector". This study primarily examines the use of the Creative Archive (CA) and Creative Commons (CC) licences among UK museums, libraries, galleries, and archives. The key objective has been to get a snapshot of current licensing practices in this area in 2007, and Jordan will report on his findings.

Via A Consuming Experience.

More on the Smithsonian image copyright issue in a Boston paper.

In real world news, I'm going to Data Sans Frontières: web portals and the historic environment at the British Museum tomorrow so come and say hello if you see me there.

Who decides?

I'm really not sure what I think about this Dear Internet letter from public.resource.org.

They've screen scraped the Smithsonian picture library and uploaded the images to Flickr. They've had legal advice that the Smithsonian's prohibitions on reuse were not valid, and state that:

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.