http://catalogue.wellcome.ac.uk/record=b1657942

http://lunacommons.org/

"New centralised dbase of all the Luna InsightBrowser sites -- incredible array of material available [eg. 13000+ photographs; 13000+ prints; 12000+ maps etc etc] from a wide variety of repostories (mostly university-type institutions). I have not played around much but this makes accessing the material really really easy compared to normal." (peacay on delicious, thanks for the alert)

RIHA Resolution on Copyright

As agreed at the RIHA General Assembly, Rome, 8 November 2008


1. Statement

“Copyright seeks to protect the rights of authorship while securing the dissemination of knowledge. It protects the form of expression of ideas, but not the ideas, information or concepts expressed (…) A regime which is unduly protective of the interest of existing rights holders may therefore inhibit, or even stifle, the development of original material.”
British Academy, Copyright and Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2006

RIHA, the International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art, is concerned that recent developments in technology, legislation and practice have meant that the various copyright exemptions that exist to promote the advance of creative and scholarly work are not being applied to achieve their intended effect. RIHA strongly believes that neither copyright nor licensing rules should inhibit the development and diffusion of original scholarly research, regardless of the way in which it is published or otherwise disseminated.

RIHA calls upon copyright holders and other stakeholders including publishers, galleries, museums, and collecting societies, when dealing with scholarly research, to:

Subscribe to the definition of scholarly research as stated in section 2 of this document

Apply the existing copyright exemptions in keeping with their intended purpose

Refrain from demanding or refusing unnecessary permissions, or granting these permissions on unreasonable terms.

RIHA further calls upon collecting societies and monopoly copyright holders, when charging for the use and reproduction of images in scholarly publications, to charge solely the marginal cost to the institution of making the specific reproduction for delivery to the researcher, rather than the costs of creating and maintaining a collection of images or of making provision for a profit margin on transactions.


2. Definitions of research

For the purpose of clarity, RIHA proposes the following definitions of research:*

Scholarly research

A type of non-commercial research whose principal objective is public benefit rather than private profit and/or the recovery of the costs of the research. Scholarly research may include the initial stages of collecting material as well as subsequent stages which involve the analysis and publication of the results. The presentation of the results will be without charge to the recipients or will be at a charge which can only be expected to cover the reasonable costs of production and distribution, including the reasonable profits of a commercial publisher.

Commercial research

Research whose principal objective is profit rather than public benefit. Commercial research normally includes a charge to the user that covers the cost of the research as well as its dissemination, and includes a profit margin.


3. Recommendations

RIHA urges copyright holders and other stakeholders to respect of the following British Academy recommendations (paraphrased):

Recommendation 1

Copyright must provide reasonably broad and practically effective exemptions for research and private study, and for criticism or review.

Recommendation 2

With regard to the exception for research and private study under the 1988 Copyright Act:

a) ‘Research’ should be treated as distinct from ‘private study’ and should not only encompass the intial stages of an academic project but also subsequent analysis and publication

b) Research should be treated as non-commercial where the taking of copyright material is fair, and where any charge to the user would only cover production and distribution of a publication (including reasonable profit of a commercial publisher)

c) Research funded by a research council or charity is by definition non-commercial

d) In the case of commercial research, charges should be reasonable and abuse should be restrained.

* The definitions of research are based on the findings and recommendations of the British Academy report Copyright and Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences (2006) and the Guidelines on Copyright and Academic Research, issued as a supplement to the report. RIHA also notes that the Joint Guidelines on Copyright and Academic Research (2008), published jointly by the British Academy and the Publishers Association, offers valuable clarification of some of the issues touched on in the 2006 report. All three documents can be accessed and downloaded at http://www.britac.ac.uk/reports/copyright

http://www.riha-institutes.org/resolutioncopyright.html

COMMENT

This is a step in the right direction! The rising costs for the image permissions are a big problem for art history publishing. Dee below the links for similar statements on this topic.

Note that fortunately the definition of non-commercial in this appeal is broader that in the Creative Commons context ("NC"). Publishing in a scholarly journal of a commercial publisher or in a publisher's database is regarded as incompatible with "NC".

Links on the art history image permission crisis

Appeal of the leading Paleographical Society CIPL 2002 against reproduction fees
http://web.archive.org/web/20020403204522/http://www.wlb-stuttgart.de/archive/repro_fees.html
http://la.boa-bw.de/archive/frei/653/0/www.wlb-stuttgart.de/archive/repro-gebuehren.html

K. Hamma: Public Domain Art, in D-Lib 2005
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/november05/hamma/11hamma.html

J. Howard: Picture Imperfect, in CHE 2006
http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i48/48a01201.htm
See http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/2484031/

Ballon/Westermann report, 2006
http://cnx.org/content/col10376/latest especially
http://cnx.org/content/m13940/latest/
http://cnx.org/content/m13952/latest/

Susan Bielstein: Permissions, A Survival Guide, 2006
See
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/5405846/
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/2484031/

Bielstein article
http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/news/bielstein-copyright.pdf

Best Practices for Access to Images: Recommendations for Scholarly Use and Publishing, 2008
http://www.arhv.lhivic.org/index.php/2008/08/22/790-best-practices-for-access-to-images-recommendations-for-scholarly-use-and-publishing
More on the "French connection":
Le droit aux images à l'ère de la publication électronique, 2007
http://www.arhv.lhivic.org/index.php/2007/01/17/272-le-droit-aux-images-a-l-ere-de-la-publication-electronique
See the German coverage
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/4075812/
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/5220894/

Materials in German

http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/3440388/ with more links

See also my "Kulturgut muss frei sein!" 2007
http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/artdok/volltexte/2008/529/
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/4477824/

Update: My Comment on the RIHA resolution published in Kunstchronik:
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/5672187/ (German)

Update: Cornell's Public Domain Policy
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/5696036/

Update: British Library
http://archiv.twoday.net/stories/219045004/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/brbl/with/3119260228/

See also
http://beineckeearlymodern.wordpress.com/2008/12/20/the-paleographical-commons/
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2008/12/rare-books-and-manuscripts-from-yale-on.html

George Oates, the architect of the Commons on Flickr (and former designer behind Flickr), was laid off by Yahoo.



http://www.foundhistory.org/2008/12/22/tragedy-at-the-commons/

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~ryanshaw/wordpress/2008/12/12/dont-leave-stewardship-to-the-companies/

http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/dmsblog/index.php/2008/12/12/vale-george-oates/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/george/sets/72157609306608548/

http://archief20.ning.com/profiles/blogs/george-oates-weg-bij-flickr

http://valleywag.gawker.com/5108583/flickr-layoffs-could-spell-a-photo-finish

Excerpt from her personal blog at
http://george08.blogspot.com/

After giving the opening keynote at the National Digital Forum in Auckland on November 27, then presenting at the Powerhouse Museum and the National Library of Australia, visiting with Commons members the State Library of New South Wales and the Australian War Memorial, I headed to Taipei for an exciting Culturemondo Roundtable event I was invited to attend. This Wednesday, I shook the hand of the Vice President of Taiwan, who was at the opening.

The next day I presented with Seb Chan, about our take on "Search & Find." That evening we all went to a lovely dinner at one of the best Taiwanese joints in Taipei. (Thanks to Tien Sing, Shadiral, Christina and Aleksandra for being such entertaining dinner conversation.) Then off for a wander in one of the massive night markets. I decided to jump in a cab back to the hotel with Jackie from NZ Live and Jock from Te Ara. It took a slightly long way home, we suspected.

When I got up to my room, I saw a text message from my manager, asking if he could call me on Friday at 9am. I wrote back to say I was going to be on a bus full of people at that time, and that I was awake now if he wanted to call. The phone rang.

"I'll just get straight to the point. You've been affected by the layoffs."

He told me he was reading from a script he was required to follow, and that he needed an address to send some sort of "Agreement" to me in Australia, and needed it sent back by December 19. Before I'd even finished the call, I twittered (to my private account):

"Wow. I just got fired." I was immediately distressed.

I stayed up until about 2:30am that night, chain smoking and talking to friends who saw my tweet and had responded - THANK YOU. I sent a formal request for time to transition The Commons program to whoever is to take it over: "A week should do it," I said. It was denied.

Worth to read more.

http://www.zeldman.com/2008/12/16/laying-off-george/

"George Oates is the last person a sane company would lay off."

UPDATE:

http://hurstassociates.blogspot.com/2008/12/ms-george-oates-and-flickr-commons.html

The former archivist at The Mariners' Museum who stole thousands of museum documents and sold them on the Internet was sentenced Wednesday to four years in prison.

Lester F. Weber, of Newport News, sold at least 3,500 documents — from collections he was supposed to oversee — on eBay under his wife's name. The items included everything from brochures and boarding passes for old ships to a lawsuit against the company that owned the Titanic.

Weber made $172,357 on the fraudulent sales between 2002 and 2006, according to court filings. But the museum estimates the worth of the stolen items at more than $500,000.

"You broke the trust of the public," said U.S. District Judge Rebecca Beach Smith, saying the public has an interest in preservation of historical artifacts.

As an archivist, Weber helped oversee a museum collection containing more than a million documents. Testimony revealed he had access to documents that many other museum employees didn't have, and changed an archiving system to make it appear that some of the stolen documents never existed.

http://www.dailypress.com/news/dp-local_museum_1218dec18,0,6554694.story