Witty’s Blog

If you are a GLAM looking to make your photographic collection more widely available online, for the last couple of years your first choice would have been to head over to “Flickr Commons”. And you would be in good company too.

However, at least for the current year, Flickr Commons is officially full:

Following a flurry of tweets - led by Mia Ridge who put out a blogpost on this topic much faster than me :-)  - May I take this opportunity then to extend an offer to all of those in “the current backlog” that Wikimedia Commons is open for business - and with a couple of new tricks up our sleeve too.

1) Disk space on the image servers has been dramatically increased very recently. It was getting pretty close to the limit for a while and some MAJOR content donations had to be put on hold whilst that was sorted out. They’ll be announced shortly and I’m really looking forward to it (hint: it’s those Dutch again!) I can’t think of a pretty picture to illustrate this point so I’ll point you to the page that wins my personal “the thing that is quite clearly important but I’m not really sure what it means, award” - http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/

2) The Multimedia Usability project is coming along nicely. Whilst I must admit the Wikimedia upload interface is not as shiny and friendly as the Flickr one, we’re doing our level best to make it easier and cleaner. One of the bigger headaches in improving Wikimedia Commons uploading is that Wikimedia only allows “free content” which means that the upload form is currently half international copyright crash-course and half upload-interface. The plus side of this is that you can be sure as a user of Wikimedia Commons that everything there has had it’s copyright checking done for you. None of this “contact us if you would like to use the image” stuff, everything is available to use and re-use. Flickr, of course, offers a much broader range of potential copyright licenses - including non-commercial and all-rights-reserved. However, in Flickr Commons a GLAM is only allowed to use the “no known copyright restrictions” tag which means that all content in Flickr Commons is already approved by the providing institution to be used in Wikimedia Commons anyway.

3) No ads, no corporation, no commercial motivation. OK, so this one isn’t exactly new, but it’s worth reiterating. Since 2005 Flickr has been owned by one of the internet’s giant commercial enterprises - Yahoo!. Flickr Commons sits at the more altruistic end of the spectrum of their activities but the fact that Flickr is owned and operated by a US commercial entity no-doubt features as a potential risk in GLAMs meetings to assess whether to join the project (especially so for publicly-funded GLAMs outside of the US where there can be rules about domestically-sourced partners etc.). Of course where I’m going with this is that Wikimedia projects are all completely ad-free, run by a charity, charge no fees for usage, require no log-ins or personal information etc. etc. The flip-side of this is that, as a corporation, Flickr can choose to take down images if the uploader says so, the Wikimedia Foundation can’t. I’ve heard that some GLAMs have been reticent to upload to Wikimedia Commons out of the fear that they can’t delete them later if they change their mind.

4) Contextualisation. The most obvious difference between Flickr and Wikimedia Commons is that Flickr is a website for photographs to be seen in-and-of-themselves whereas on Wikimedia the images are (at least ostensibly) intended to be used in an encyclopedia. Of course there’s no obligation that an image uploaded to Wikimedia Commons would ever be used in a Wikipedia article but that is the general idea. Flickr is good for discussing photograhy as an artform in dialogical fashion (a very valid activity - don’t get me wrong) and the audience there is allowed to curate galleries quite easily. On the other hand Wikimedia Commons is good for being able to take a more curatorial approach - to embed the images in an educational context where the cultural significance of the subject/medium/author etc. can be elaborated. Both are useful things but Flickr can be a bit of an ‘echo chamber’ - especially when it’s an image of a collection item.

5) Usage checking. If you look down the bottom of the page for any image in Wikimedia Commons you will be able to see a section entitled “File Usage on Other Wikis”. This global checker is relatively new and enables you to see just how and where any individual image is being contextualised in articles across all the different language editions of Wikipedia. For example, check the usage of this image of former German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer (donated to Wikimedia by the German Federal Archives). You can see that it is used in three articles in the English edition but also two articles in Hebrew, two in Arabic, etc. etc. That’s the kind of statistical usage-proof that makes for great executive summaries to management.

5.1) Usage Checking - categories! This one is really new. Not only can you look up the stats for an individual image but now you can do it for a whole category using the “GLAMerous tool” by Magnus Manske. Try one of the “popular groups” to give it a go. This tool will aggregate the usage statistics for any category - most especially things like “category:images from xyz museum”. This lets you see in short order the combined multimedia contribution and usage of any GLAM on Wikipedia. Very nice!

Ultimately, they’re related projects with similar aims - the publication of GLAM multimedia content to a wider audience - but they go about their work in deliberately different ways. 2010 will no doubt prove to be an interesting year for multimedia in Wikimedia projects.

[update: Mia's blogpost about this topic now includes a collection of the tweet replies she received to the question "has anyone done audience research into why museums prefer Flickr to Wikimedia commons?"

Some of the responses included:

Nick: Flickr lets you choose CC non-commercial licenses, whereas Wikimedia Commons needs to permit potential commercial use?

Janet: Apart fr better & clear CC licence info, like Flickr Galleries that can be made by all! [and] What I implied but didn’t say before: Flickr provides online space for dialogue about and with images.

Richard: Flickr is so much easier to view and search than WM. Commons, and of course easier to upload.

Hopefully, I’ve adequately addressed these comments in the body of my post. iane15 had this to say in the comments:

At Hampshire County Council, the Museums Service got 99% to a Flickr Commons agreement, then Flickr said they ” need to delay adding more Commons partners until later in the year”. That was June 2009. Emails in December have gone unanswered. I don’t think we’re even going to bother any more.

Intriguing.]

[Update 2: Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum has just made a detailed reply to this post detailing what advantages the Powerhouse saw (and still sees) in Flickr Commons over Wikimedia Commons. Whilst my blogpost identifies what I see as Wikimedia's advantages for GLAMs, I must admit I do agree with his assessment of Flickr's relative strengths. The kicker is this:

Whilst Wikipedia and Wikimedia are, in themselves, exciting projects, their structure, design and combative social norms do not currently make them the friendly or the protected space that museums tend to be comfortable operating in.

He also reiterates the importance of the Multimedia Usability initiative which might be able to address some of Seb's points (though not all, as some are social rather than technical issues) and hopefully make Wikimedia a little bit more GLAM-friendly.]

New Year’s Day: Happy 2010 and Happy Public Domain Day!

January First each year is the day that the archives are opened and one more year’s cultural content loses copyright restriction and returns to Public Domain (PD).^[1] For most countries the copyright term currently stands at the ludicrously long 50 or even 70 years after the death of the creator.^[2] Despite this lag and to celebrate the new releases, I’d like to tell you a story I heard at the “Unlocking IP” conference and re-told in my “thanks to the presenters” speech at GLAM-WIKI.^[3]

A classic piece of Australian literature is the 1918 story of “The Magic Pudding” by the renowned artist and writer Norman Lindsay.

The Magic Pudding: Being The Adventures of Bunyip Bluegum and his friends Bill Barnacle and Sam Sawnoff is an Australian children’s book written and illustrated by Norman Lindsay. It is a comic fantasy, a classic of Australian children’s literature. The story is set in Australia with humans mixing with anthropomorphic animals. It tells of a magic pudding which, no matter how often it is eaten, always reforms in order to be eaten again. It is owned by three companions who must defend it against Pudding Thieves who want it for themselves. The book is divided into four “slices” instead of chapters. There are many short songs interspersed throughout the text, varying from stories told in rhyme to descriptions of a characters’ mood or behaviour and verses of an ongoing sea song.

First published in 1918, The Magic Pudding is considered to be a children’s classic, and continues to be reprinted. A new edition was released in 2008 to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the book, and October 12th was declared “Pudding Day”. The new edition features the original artwork as well as a biography, the first book reviews, letters between the Lindsay and publisher, and various recipes. The Magic Pudding is said to have been written to settle an argument: a friend of Lindsay’s said that children like to read about fairies, while Lindsay asserted that they like to read about food.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article “The Magic Pudding” version number 332295723

Not only is this story both beautiful and hilarious it is also a fantastic analogy for the Public Domain in at least three ways:

• Just as culture becomes richer the more it is used and re-used, Albert “the cut an’ come-again puddin’ ” likes nothing better than to be eaten because the more he is eaten, the more he re-grows. This is the plot device around which the whole story turns and a fact of culture around which our society revolves. If we had to invent everything anew we would be living, as Goethe said, “from hand to mouth”. Culture gets better, richer and deeper the more it is passed around and shared. If it didn’t, what kind of society would we have? If Albert didn’t regrow, what would be the point of Lindsay’s story?

• Even though the Public Domain is hard to own, confine and control, people are alway trying to do precisely that. Similarly, although Albert persists in trying to run away, his current owners are always trying to stop others from having him. The book recounts the story of how Bunyip Bluegum, the Koala, Bill Barnacle the Sailor, and Sam Sawnoff the penguin, (who call themselves the “Noble Society of Pudding Owners”) fight for control of the puddin’ against “The Pudding Thieves” Possum and Wombat. More and more nefarious tactics are used to try and regain sole control over Albert despite the fact that there is - by definition - always enough pudding to go around. The characters are not satisfied with an unlimited supply of pudding, they want to control others’ use of it too. It is the same with much of PD culture…

• To put it mildly, Albert is cantankerous. He may give himself freely, but he takes back in the form of irritability. I don’t know about your impression, but one of the defining features I see of the Wikimedian community (and I count myself among them) is their cantankerousness. We may give all of our intellectual output away freely in the form of Wikipedia - “the cut an’ come-again ‘pedia” - but there has never been an action that we’ve taken that wasn’t vigorously debated and called “controversial” by someone. Seriously - I challenge anyone to think of anything in Wikimedia that received unanimous approval from the community.

Ironically though, the Magic Pudding story and all of its gorgeous illustrations will remain all-rights-reserved until 2039 because that will be the 70th anniversary of Norman Lindsay’s death in 1969.^[4]

By the way, check out some of the beautiful original drawings that are held at the State Library of NSW here and the short documentary video produced by Screen Australia about the illustrations here.

^[1] I recently had a debate with Prof. Graham Greenleaf, whom I must credit with the marvellous analogy that is the subject of this post, about what the best verb is to describe this changeover. The common phrase is “falls” into PD but this implies a loss of status - some sort of descent. Obviously as a proponent of free-culture I don’t want to imply this. Perhaps “ascends” to PD is more laudatory but it is an equally loud value-judgement. My personal favourite is “returns” to PD as this is based on an originalist approach to copyright. Copyright was originally invented as a restriction placed upon cultural content, “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”. PD was the norm, copyright was the exception. These days the common understanding is the reverse (that in-copyright is/should be the norm and PD is somehow an aberration). So, “Returns to PD” is a linguistic decision to imply that we are back to the natural, original, correct state.

^[2] Here in Australia, through a quirk of history, we also have PD for photographs up until 1955 irrespective of the year of the death of the author - a good thing™. However this does not apply to other art forms such as literature or illustration.

^[3] I’d like to thank Anne Howard and the Norman Lindsay Gallery and Museum at Faulconbridge, operated by the National Trust of Australia (NSW branch), for the thank you gifts at GLAM-WIKI. All Wikimedia Australia helpers at the event received a Magic Pudding coffee mug and our international guests Jennifer Riggs and Mathias Schindler each received an illustrated copy of the book - all generously provided by the National Trust. You can order these gifts online or visit the house and the gallery if you happen to be in the beautiful Blue Mountains west of Sydney.

^[4] As a result, and against my custom, the illustrations from the book that I’ve placed in this blogpost remain in-copyright. Oddly, the full text of the book can be downloaded from Project Gutenburg here as they claim it is not copyrighted under USA law. I claim that the use of the illustrations here is “fair dealing” under section 41 (criticism or review) or perhaps even 41a (parody or satire) of the 1968 Australian Copyright Act. If you don’t like that justification then in the words of Apple Inc. - “Sosumi“.

A few months ago I attended one of a series of meetings nationally called “Opening Access to Australian Archives” - hosted by CCi (who also house the office of Creative Commons Australia). and the draft outcomes from these meetings have now been published.

The aim of these meetings is to create a statement of principles for Australia’s collecting instutitions (i.e. GLAMs) about how their collections should be made available, usable and re-usable. Everyone agrees in principle that more access is a good thing but the practicalities are tricky - especially if there’s no industry standard. Are there any standards internationally, if not, then perhaps this could be used as a model elsewhere?

A draft of the Open Access Principles for Australian Collecting Institutions is now available on a wiki at http://openingarchives.wikidot.com/ The principles are on a wiki so that others can amend/add to/comment on them - so please feel free to do so.

If you don’t want to go through all the documentation, here are the 6 “foundation principles” that have emerged from the meetings. I think you’ll agree that they’re consistent with a free-culture approach:
1) Resources should be made available for reuse unless there is a justifiable reason why they should not.
2) The reuse of resources should be as unconstrained as possible. For example, resources should be made available for commercial reuse as well as non-commercial reuse wherever possible.
3) The range of permitted uses of resources should be as wide as possible, for example, including the right to copy the resource, modify it and produce derivative works from it.
4) Reuse should be encouraged by permitting others to redistribute resources on a world-wide basis.
5) Resources should be made directly available and discoverable electronically whenever possible.
6) The conditions of use for each resource should be linked directly to the resource so that they are reusable at the point of discovery.

Of course, there are also very important limiting considerations that go alongside these principles - things like legal, cost or ethical concerns. Notably, several commonly used arguments have been demoted to “invalid reasons” for withholding access because they are contradictory to the foundation principles. These include: preventing ‘bad’ derivative uses; potential embarrassment to public figures; not ‘worthy’ of being released; unsubstantiated legal risk; maintaining the integrity of the collection.

All in all, pretty good news in my opinion! A final draft will appear in a month or two.  The minutes from the State meetings up on the Opening Australia’s Archives website (bottom of the page). Many thanks to Jessica Coates (who in her normal role runs CreativeCommons Australia and is a good friend of our Wikimedia Chapter) for being the facilitator of this great project!

I’ve been meeting with a lot of GLAM institutions recently who are keen to collaborate with Wikimedia projects but, unsurprisingly, wanted to “go on a few dates before getting married”. So, this post is directed to those institutions who are looking at finding a small, manageable project that they can undertake with the Wikimedia community - a project that has a low level of risk and difficulty but with a relatively high level of measurable impact. A good ROI for some low-hanging fruit, if you will. This is by no means the only thing a GLAM could collaborate on with the Wikimedia community, so don’t be limited by it, but it is nevertheless a viable option.

Dearest GLAM,
What I suggest is that you upload one image, of one object, to Wikimedia Commons.
Just the one.
But, a quite specific one.

1) Selection
I suggest that you find within your collection an item that is notable in and of itself. Ideally this object already has a Wikipedia article written about it already or it should be an object of individual significance enough to warrant such an article (see our policy on Notability). If you don’t have any such items in your collection perhaps there is something, though not uniquely notable, that is a perfect example of its type and warrants being the headline image for the article about genre/style/craft.

To avoid conflicts between the Wikimedia community and the institution about whether the faithful reproduction of a 2D object creates new copyright in favour of the organisation making the reproduction (see the backgrount to the NPG controversy for more information about this subject), I recommend specifically choosing a 3D item - an ancient sculpture or archeological artifact for example - that is in itself definitively out of copyright. Thereby, your photograph of this object is incontrovertibly the institution’s own copyright and no other copyright claims exist.

2) Username
Go to Wikimedia Commons (the multimedia repository associated with Wikipedia) and create a user account. Technically, Wikimedia policy says you’re not supposed to have “role accounts” (usernames associated with an organisation rather than an individual). Speaking for myself, I can understand this on Wikipedia (where a role-account may be promotional and unaccountable) but on Commons having a role account seems to me to be a good thing as it provides good attribution to the institution. So, whilst the anti-role-account rule is in place I suggest the institution create a username something like “user:JohnCitizen_NationalMuseumofAtlantis” (this gives both attribution and personalisation).

3) Tech specs
Take your “canonical photograph” of this item and compare it to the existing free-use images available of it online (e.g. in the Wikipedia article, on Flickr, Google Image search etc.) and also compare it to Wikipedia’s “Featured Picture Criteria“. Ideally the image being donated to Wikimedia Commons should be of higher quality than any other freely-available image of the object and the image should be clearly above the minimum standards for being listed as a Featured Picture. Among other things, this means that it should be at least 1000pixels along the longest side. But, as with all of Wikipedia’s quality standards, this tends to increase over time so it is good to go significantly above these criteria if possible (especially if the subject of the photograph has fine/intricate details). Also the level of “wow factor” to the Wikimedia community is almost directly proportional to the resolution of the image. For example, some of our most highly prized images are simply huge. (Also, please don’t upload images with watermarks or equivalent).

4) Upload and notify
Although it’s a bit unwieldy (and we’re working on improving it), use the “upload file” form and upload the image putting in as much attribution, metadata, captioning as you want. Many of the specific elements of uploading are a bit tricky to work out (e.g. placing it in categories or giving it a geo-code) but the essential should be straightforward. The most important bit is that the image is “your own work” (i.e. it’s copyright to the institution) and that you agree to release this copyright under the Creative-Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. (Other acceptable copyright licenses are available but this is the Wikimedia community’s preference.) Yes, this license does mean that third-parties can make commercial use of your image without asking your specific permission. But! If they make a derivative work (such as incorporating the image into a montage for a documentary film) then that derivative work has to be “shared alike” and made equally freely-available. This, not surprisingly, is something that commercial re-users rarely want to do and therefore they would need to get your specific permission for their usage requirements. Feel free to charge them $$$$$ if they are unwilling to release their work into the commons like you have.

Because your image has never been made available before under a free-license, it is probable that Wikimedians checking the copyright status of new uploads might be suspicious that the image has been uploaded without the copyright holder’s consent. Write an email, from your work email address (for verification purposes), to the “permissions system” attesting to the fact that the upload is legitimate and that you really did intend to release it under that license. If you don’t do this, someone might list the image for deletion from Wikimedia Commons in an attempt to make sure that the copyright of your institution isn’t being infringed. The burden of proof on copyright checking lies with the uploader, not the deleter.

5) Tell a Wikimedian
Tell several. Tweet it. Dent it. Blog it. Notify someone on the discussion page associated with the Wikipedia article about the item itself. Leave a message with your local Wikimedia Chapter or the relevant WikiProject. These people will then rally around the image and make sure that it is appropriately categorised, and that it is used in relevant Wikipedia articles, probably in several languages. For example, the Deutsches Bundesarchiv ’s image of Konrad Adenauer is now used as the headline image in upwards of 15 language editions of Wikipedia. It is now THE image of Adenaur across the internet (see the “global file usage“).

6) Go for Gold
Leave it a week and then check to see how many times the image is being used in Wikipedia, especially the Wikipedia edition in your institution’s “home” language. Assuming you’ve uploaded an image of high enough quality then the image may very well qualify as a Featured Picture. Nudge a Wikimedian or two to ask them to nominate it as a Featured Picture Candidate for you. What will follow will be about a week’s worth of public critiquing of the image’s technical quality, encyclopedic value, replicability… The image may get worked on a bit in Photoshop by a Wikimedian or someone might come along and crop it more tightly. But, if all goes well, then the image will be given the gold star that is Featured Image status. Congratulations.

The image is now worthy to be displayed on Wikipedia’s main page for a day. There is a queue for this and every FP is eligible for this honour once. Generally FPs go on the mainpage on a first-in first-out basis, but hopefully given that you’re a special guest on Wikipedia, someone will bump-up your image to appear on the mainpage sooner rather than later - but there’s no promises Unfortunately, we don’t currently clicktrack people going to the GLAM’s website from the image’s attribution statement (for privacy reasons) but if you are aware of the image’s imminent appearance on the mainpage then perhaps you could get your own tech department to monitor inbound traffic to your website over that 24 period to see if there is any difference. You can also check how often the article appears is viewed by clicking on the “history” tab at the top of the article, then click “page view statistics”. You should see a noticeable spike once the stats are compiled a day or two later.

7) Repeat!

Best of luck.

[n.b.: this is a discussion about subtleties of English language usage and therefore the issues will be different or possibly not applicable in other languages.]

You may know the old saying:

“one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter“

When we in the Wikimedia community use the phrase “content liberation” in front of those who look after original collections of content, they don’t hear “freedom” they hear “theft”.

[One of the idea-boards at the Chapters meeting in Berlin]

“Content liberation” is a commonly used phrase in Wikimedia-land to describe the effort to have media items (most frequently collections of old photographs):

1. Digitised;
2. Published online (especially in high resolution, in a lossless format, without DRM or irritating intermediate layers like zoomify);
3. Released (if still in-copyright) under a free-culture approved copyright license;
4. Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons.

The emphasis in this effort is the publication and dissemination of cultural heritage that was previously unavailable, or only available to a certain few, so that it can be given a new lease of life - to set it free.

However for the gallery/library/archive/museum (GLAM) that owns the original physical object there is a corresponding and sometimes contrasting concern to that of publication - that of preservation. Not just preservation of the original object in its proper state but also the preservation of the context and proper ‘meaning’ of the object. Just as people don’t like to be quoted out of context, museums don’t like their works being used to demonstrate ideas contrary to the spirit of the object. The phrase that represents this feeling, something that I have been told countless times when talking about the value of remix culture, is:

“…preserving the integrity of the collection.”

So, you can see that from that perspective, when we in Wikimedia-land come along to a museum and ask them to “liberate” their photographs to Wikimedia Commons (and any subsequent users of our free-culture content) they might be happy for the increased publication but also unhappy about the potential for their photographs to be “misquoted”. It is their job, after all, to make sure people don’t just have access to knowledge but that they are given it in an appropriate and correct way.[1]

It is at this point that the phrase “but it’s out of copyright, you have no right to stop me using the image any way I chose once it’s been liberated” might spring to the mind of a free-culture advocate. I’ve tried it. Unsurprisingly, it’s not endearing…

[The content liberation army of the People's Republic of Wikimedia
comes to deliver "freedom" to another museum.]

Imagine if you were in a political or religious debate with someone and they told you that you needed to be “liberated”. I am willing to bet my left arm (not my right - I need that one) that you are no longer going to listen to a word that person has to say. So, if we want to build relationships with content owners we need to give them the power to decide for themselves whether or not to join us. What we should not do is take their power from them by “liberating” their content, thereby forcing them into a defensive stance - a position where they are likely to stay in for some time.

Of course, this does not mean that we should roll over and acquiesce to the outrageous claims made by some content holders - such as “you may look at this 200 year old painting on our website but you aren’t allowed to copy it”.[2]  Nevertheless we need to find a more collaborative phrase than “liberate”. This is why the subtitle of the GLAM-WIKI conference was “finding the common ground” and the key phrase we tried to get across (and repeated over and over) was that we wanted to focus on “sustainable partnerships”.

I think WM-UK’s Brian McNeill has a very good added point too:

To sum up, I see “content liberation” as the ideological goal we aim for, but we have to live in the real world. There has to be a clear focus on reassuring those [who are] running museums and galleries that WMF isn’t out to steal their customers and eat their lunch - you have to convince them that making copies of work available is going to highlight what they have, and that only there can you view it in “eyeball Xmillion pixels” resolution. Reality is that the Wikimedia/Wikipedia pages for any art they have are going to rank far higher than their own archives. I’d say there is a degree of responsibility to refer people back to them, and encourage people to actually go to the physical premises. Sure, the “content liberation” allows millions who might never have seen a work to see a photograph, but there should be an effort to encourage those fit, able, and affluent enough, to go see it in person. What I take from “content liberation” is that you no longer need to go to the museum because it is online. That is most definitely not what I think should be encouraged, nor a realistic pitch to those who you want to share content.[3]

[1] This has particular resonance with the issue of Indigenous cultural rights (discussed in greater detail in my “GLAM-WIKI recommendations” blogpost - part 3). This is a whole huge area of discussion in its own right but it is something, just like Biographies of Living People, that I am positive will become increasingly important as Wikipedia becomes increasingly mainstream. More on this topic some other time.

[2] On a related note, I’d like to recommend that anyone who is interested in the “in-person copying policy” of museums (also known as the photography policy) should read this post by the suitably awesome Nina Simon (on twitter here) who is working on her book “The participatory museum: a practical guide” which I eagerly await.

[3] The fact that “nothing beats the real thing” is something that was also raised in my “GLAM-WIKI recommendations” blogpost - part 1. For everything from museums to zoos to football matches it is important to encourage those that are able to make real-world interaction with their culture that Wikipedia doesn’t currently do - but we’re working on it.

After the amazing Copyright Future conference held this week [good 30 second summary here], Wikimedia Australia was invited to attend a select roundtable meeting of cultural institutions and ‘thought leaders’ on the topic of Open(ing) Access to Australia’s cultural heritage.

Interestingly, what we seemed to discover was that whilst every institution - and I’m talking the major national organisations here - is theoretically on board with the idea of opening up and sharing their content, in practice they each have independent policies that stymie this. It’s rather like the way that Australia doesn’t have a consistent rail gauge - nothing really connects up and everyone is duplicating each others’ efforts…

When it became clear that the problems standing in the way of greater access and harmonisation were procedural (rather than problems of infrastructure as with the railways) I piped up and asked the somewhat provocative question of why most of Australia’s cultural institutions used generic access-restriction phrases on every single item in their collection irrespective of its age/access policy/copyright. Here are three of many examples:

A bit of backstory…

At this point I would like to refer you to the excellent blogpost by Sage Ross, grad student at Yale, from January this year entitled “Libraries and Copyfraud”. It explains the situation Wikimedians find themselves in when working with cultural institutions who make these kinds of blanket statements. Here is the key paragraph where Sage describes his attempt to access an already digitised copy of a portrait of Charles Darwin from the Huntington Library:

…In the exchange that followed, I tried to explain why the library has neither the moral nor legal right to pretend authority over the image (although, I pointed out, charging fees for distribution is fine, even if their fees are pretty steep). A Curatorial Assistant, and then a Curator, tried to explain to me that the Huntington actually has generous lending policies (you don’t “lend” a PD [public domain] digital image, I replied), that while the original is PD, using the digital file is “fair use” that library has the right to enforce (fair use, by definition, only applies to copyrighted works, I replied), that having the physical copy entails the right to grant, or not, permission to use reproductions (see Bridgeman v. Corel, I replied), that other libraries and museums do the same thing (that doesn’t make it right, I replied), that big corporations might use it without giving the library a cut if they didn’t claim rights (nevertheless, claiming such rights is called copyfraud and it’s a crime, I replied), and finally that I should contact the Yale libraries and museums and see if they do things any differently (a return to the earlier “everyone else does it” argument with a pinch of ad hominem for good measure, to which I see no point in replying)….

Apart from some differences of law [See footnote 1 for the three main differences between his circumstances in the US and those in Australia] his experience in coming up against the “everyone else does it” argument is entirely familiar. Another important argument raised by cultural institutions for these kinds of access policies - one for which I have much sympathy - is that due to depleted “core funding” the institutions need to charge customers in order to pay for their daily operations.

So, back to the roundtable meeting…

From where I was sitting, it appeared that those who represented cultural institutions were saying: “well yes, of course we charge access fees. It’s a business model and we need the funding. Everyone else does it…” At the same time the lawyers and academics were saying: “well no, of course they wouldn’t do that. The content is already online so there’s no basis in law for the fee to be applied…” This was the moment where everyone looked at one other and said: “Ah, Houston we have a problem“. But it is from these kinds of moments that the best kind of collaboration can occur. And so in our case, although the problem is not new, there seemed to be an awareness that specific measures need to be taken.

Into this breach stepped Dr. Prodromous Tsiavos who has been dealing with similar issues in the UK. He broke it down into three specific areas. I believe that if all Australia’s cultural institutions signed on to his suggestions, we would be in a much happier place because we would all be rolling on the same digital rail gauge.

1) Standard Access policy

Setting aside the issue of copyright, there is no agreed-upon “best-practice access model”. Each institution’s legal department writes its own rules and then the front-line staff have to enforce them. This is a recipe for confusion, frustration and the creation of organisational fiefdoms. It would be of great assistance if there was a document from the federal government stating the principles that they recommend publicly-funded institutions follow. Perhaps this would be a task that the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) could undertake?  Trying to access a particular (public domain) image from the collection of one of Australia’s peak cultural institutions, I ended up speaking with staff from three different levels. Each one overruled the other whilst referencing the same access policy. The range of policies in effect across the country is broad. Some institutions say they allow personal/private use; some say they allow educational use; some ask for an access form to be submitted; some require a clickthrough agreement to their terms of use; some use technical protection measures (TPMs) to inhibit access (such as using unstable URLs, popup windows and embedding files in the .flv (adobe flash) format) yet others offer a “download here” button.

I would suggest we look to the Library of Congress in the US for a best-practice example. They do not have any generic statement on items. Their copyright information page gives details about how you can make your own assessment on the copyright status. They also publish a list of the “rights and restrictions” for many of their works so that you can see for yourself what the rules of the game are and where to go for further permission (when required).

2) Licence Toolkit

Once it is determined that a licence is required, each institution currently has its own separate system for drafting agreements. This is not relevant to Wikimedia as everything on Wikimedia projects must allow downstream access/usage. Nevertheless, it is a huge time and cost burden on the thousands of end-users of Australia’s cultural heritage. Drafting and managing these kinds of agreements takes approximately 70% of my work time at the Dictionary of Sydney despite the fact that each of the agreements has the same restrictions and warranties. One of the key advantages of the Creative Commons licencing scheme is the way it is “off the shelf” and “mix and match”. Rather than every institutions having to draft and manage bespoke licences that say effectively the same thing it would be good if there were a standard licence toolkit which everyone could access. Again, the federal government could play a role here as I am willing to bet my left arm that this measure alone would produce huge labour and cost efficiencies. People could stop worrying about managing licences and start getting down to the business. And I mean business. How much money and time is spent by the cultural production houses like the ABC and SBS tracking down and managing licenses when that money could be better spent in producing content.

The Australian Copyright Council would no doubt be appalled by this idea. Despite the fact that they are government funded to provide neutral copyright advice they behave as if they have a vested interest is in maintaining complexity in the licencing system. Their dislike of the Creative Commons system, precisely because it is “off the shelf”, is testament to that. Unfortunately, because of their own access conditions to their (government funded) work, I am not allowed to talk about what they have to say. This is what is written on the last page of their “Creative Commons licences (information sheet) GO94″. Oh the irony…

3) Standard Workflow

Standard workflow is a corollary of the first two points. If you have a standard policy for access, and you have a clear system of licensing usage for items still in copyright, then you need a standard way of managing the process. Each institution currently has a different format for directing access/licence requests and these requests pass through different departments. For example, sometimes I am simply asked to notify by email my having received permission for use of an in-copyright work; sometimes I need to fill out and fax a monthly form; sometimes I need to wait for that form to be signed by a copyright officer and returned; sometimes I need to send an image gallery of the items I intend to use; and so on … It would be more efficient for the organisation and easier for the customer if the processes were simpler and the default policy was built around access rather than restriction.

I have a strong feeling that these issues are going to be raised at the upcoming GLAM-WIKI meeting in Canberra. In fact, since I’m the one convening it, I’m going to make sure they do. We need to all be rolling on the same digital rail gauge.

Peace, love & metadata to all.

Liam

[footnote 1] There are three big differences between his circumstance and that in Australia - 1) the idea of Public Domain [PD] is not actually enshrined in law in Australia as it is in America. It’s never actually been tested - so I hear. In the exact reverse of the American experience it is impossible for the Australian government to license something as PD and even the CreativeCommonsZero license is on shaky ground here. 2) We don’t have “fair use” but rather “fair dealing” which is in effect much more restricted. In the US-AU free trade agreement we managed to get US-style copyright term extentions but failed to get any of their generous copyright exceptions to match. 3) Bridgeman v. Corel is not a binding precedent in the Australian jurisdiction.

Thank you Brianna for pointing out that the Australian Department of Communications, Broadband and the Digital Economy (with the memorable acronym DCBDE) has published all 116 public submissions to their ‘consultation draft’ for the Digital Economy Future Directions Paper.

You can find Wikimedia Australia’s two cents right down at the bottom between the “West Gippsland Regional Library Corporation” and “Yahoo!”. The perils of having a name that starts with a “W” I know only too well…

There are submissions from the usual suspects (Telstra, Google, Microsoft, seven from IBM and one from Sony - the corporation with a CEO that “…doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet…“) as well as some from organisations you wouldn’t expext, like Lonely Planet - yes, the travel publishing company. LP focus their submission on Australia’s “Safe Harbour” scheme and why they believe it should be strengthened. They even favourably namedrop Wikipedia. How very kind of them. On page 4 they write:

In short, interactivity and collaboration have become the mantra of the digital age.

The use of interactive and collaborative communications technology is often economically and socially valuable. For example:
Wikipedia provides an outlet for subject matter experts to self-publish and share knowledge with the world on all varieties of topics, thus providing an ever increasingly helpful research tool, as well as a public forum for new, topical or arcane issues;

There is also another group of submissions - althogether expected - from the copyright collection agencies and related groups who represent a copyright maximalist stance.

What strikes me as interesting is the dichotomy. On the other hand, there are the submissions from organisations that represent education, research, user groups and the like, which all talk about innovation, collaboration, sharing, development. On the other hand, there are submissions from the copyright clan, which all talk about protection, theft, exploitation (the good kind - commercially, by them) and exploitation (the bad kind - any, by you) etc. It is as if they were speaking two different languages. Here are some highlights:

• the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT):

In other words - better access to modern communications technology will harm the business model of corporations who rely on people being passive consumers of cultural output (such as ‘you’ll get what you’re given’ television and cinema). This is the same as saying that better access to motor vehicles harms the horse & carriage industry, which is very true, but it doesn’t mean that it’s a bad thing.

• the Australian Publishers Association (APA):

“The Government should look to strengthen rather than dilute its copyright regulations and introduce no new exceptions to the Copyright Act without conducting a thorough, fundamental review of the legislation to take into account the needs of the digital economy” [p3.]

In other words - they think Copyright laws are too lax. Exceptions that are being proposed (such as allowing teachers to display free, public websites in schools without paying royalties) go too far down the road of making “free education” practically viable. You wouldn’t have thought that it would even require an exception but apparently Australia is the only country in the world that requires educational institutions to pay to use publicly available websites. The school system is asking for an exception to this but it is being opposed…

• the Australian Record Industry Association (ARIA)

“The introduction of “access” services is the single most important current development in the music business. Online services like Nokia’s Comes With Music are transforming the way people enjoy music, offering more choice in music downloads than ever before. Music track sales were up to 1.4 billion globally in 2008.” [p3]

Later in the same page (and elsewhere in the document) they go into detail about how much money the industry is losing to filesharing of in-copyright music. At least the Australian music industry peak body is not suggesting that every illegal download equals a lost sale. They figure it’s 1 in 5 (same page) - this is not what they used to say and the change to a more reasonable method for calculating potential lost sales should be recognised. However, combining in the one page a section that says how well the industry is doing out of digital sales followed by a much lengthier section about how much the industry is losing, seems to be trying to make an argument both ways at the same time. That is, they argue that the industry is healthy, responsive to market changes and important to the national economy. At the same time they argue that it is being attacked and in need of government regulatory support.

• the Australian Copyright Council (ACC)

“The Consultation Paper refers to the Powerhouse Museum and the State Library of NSW having recently placed photographs (in which copyright has expired) from their
collections onto the US website Flickr. Flickr generates revenue, through advertising, for its US owner, Yahoo…”

“…When considering the success of this project, however, the generation of revenue that does not come back to the collecting institutions to further their activities must be
taken into account. That must be weighed against factors such as the numbers of people who view the items online, whether those are the people the collecting
institution wants to reach, and the quantity and relevance to the collecting institutions of the information about the photographs contributed by Flickr users.” [p3]

(One of the wonderful images taken from the PHM archive, placed on Flickr, then copied across to Wikimedia Commons.)

This seems to directly contradict what the Powerhouse Museum (PHM) is reporting about their decision to put their pictures on Flickr. Their image services manager presented a paper at the recent “Museums and the Web” conference entitled “Open licensing and the future for collections” on exactly this topic. On all metrics this experiment has been a success - even to the point of reducing the number of phone calls to the curatorial staff from the public wanting to ask simple questions. People now ask their questions on the Flickr comments section where the rest of the viewing community can usually answer satisfactorally - allowing the staff to be more productive.

The ACC also suggests that the PHM has willingly or unintentionally ’sold out’ to an overseas commercial company.

First the ‘commercial’ aspect: In Wikimedia-land, we have copied across onto Wikimedia commons many of these photographs and would indeed like to see the Powerhouse upload directly there - Wikimedia being non-commercial after all. But we understand that Flickr offers a better workflow for collection management and also has a larger direct audience than Wikimedia-Commons. As they are Public Domain images anyway, Wikimedians can copy the images freely by themselves. If the Powerhouse had chosen to put a digital padlock on the images then there would be a problem and the proprietary nature of the Flickr system would be rightly questionable as the best method for publication. However, since the Powerhouse are using this tool the way it should - to encourage access rather than to extend restrictions to a new platform - everyone is happy. Hey, even Obama’s doin’ it.

Secondly, the ‘overseas’ aspect: There is an expectation, and indeed a requirement, that government funded content be hosted on Australian websites so that it remains within the national jurisdiction. There is also an element of the ‘national interest’ argument here, along the same lines as why we want to be able to build our own submarines and not have to rely on foreign contractors. I understand and in fact agree with this concern - I would like Australia to be self-sufficient in providing access to its own culture. However, what the ACC submission does not mention is that all of these photographs placed on Flickr were already available on the PHM website - which is hosted within Australia. As with the commercial discussion above, if the PHM had published exclusively on foreign websites then this would be a problem. But given that these are copies of Public Domain images published on their own website and the original objects are all safely stored away (in Australia) the PHM did not do anything that would go against their mandate to protect Australian cultural independence.

• the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL)

CAL’s submission focuses mainly on the suggestion that the Government might be looking into releasing Public Sector Information (PSI), you know, like, publicly. An extension of the “it’s taxpayer money that paid for it to be written so why should we have to pay to read it” argument. One of the most obvious roads to do this would be to adopt Creative Commons licensing - a step that some agencies are already taking up, such as the Australian Bureau of Statistics publishing under the CC-by license.

The particular argument being used here against putting PSI under a Creative Commons license is a new one - for me at least. It seems to be saying that by using CC licensing, people would be able to rework the government’s words to mean something they did not originally intend and the government would have no way of stopping them. Since when is that a concern of copyright law? More than likely there will be many incorrect quotations and incorporations of PSI into other materials but the copyright status of the PSI one way or the other will have no effect on this. People misquote and misconstrue (intentionally and unintentionally) PSI all the time and no one is especially bothered - and that is with Crown Copyright firmly in place. In a cost/benefit analysis the question would be: How great are the potential advantages of allowing the public greater freedom of use of the the content that already own as taxpayers, relative to the potential harm associated with an increase in misquotations as a result of copyright licensing changes.

And in recognition of your having read down this far, I award you the Copyright Society of the United States’ hastily drawn “copyright cat” .gif:

Thanks to the efforts of Brianna and Tawker I now have a functional website.

It is with pleasure that I can now declare that ceci EST un blog! And, since I’ll be talking almost exclusively about Wikimedia related things I’ve applied to be included in the Planet Wikimedia blog aggregator. We’ll see how that goes.

In the mean time, I’ll point you to a couple of interesting things that have popped up in the last couple of days:

• Creative Commons have released their interim report on what people actually think “Non-Comercial” actually means. It’s a damn hard question and frankly I think CC have given themselves more trouble than it’s worth by even giving that option. Everyone you ask has a different opinion and that’s what the survey was trying to find out. Their interim report has the fascinating statistic that the vast majority of people who classify themselves as “creators” (therefore, they have published their IP online - generally in Flickr) do not consider themselves to have any copyright. Bizzare. They probably think they have to register for it. Check it out here.

• The Wikimedia Foundation is offering a series of positions at the moment - 1 intern, 2 techies (one for running the office and one for coding the usability project’s work) and 3 for the strategic plan. Check them out here. I’m fascinated by these last three as the descriptions (and the shear fact that there will be three new staff) demonstrate the seriousness of the Foundation’s intentions with regards to this strategic plan. We’ve never had one before so there could be really interesting, and possibly unexpected, outcomes.

• Finally, the website “Digital NZ” (the new zealand government’s “we’re on the web too” page - that’s actually really good) has a great rundown of some of the required reading that came out of the annual “Museums and the Web” conference recently. Check it out here.

That’s all for now. See you soon on Wikimedia Planet, hopefully.