Copyright as it is currently practiced is a failure. It is not even handed and it prevents our use of much historic material. A good example is this picture of Aletta Jacobs. It can be found in the archive of the Library of Congress, they make it available in a high quality tiff file. It mentions a photographer, a F. Julius Oppenheim, and nobody knows anything about the man.Aletta Jacobs died in 1929. As it is possible that this image is still under copyright, this picture will not be accepted in Commons. The biography of Dr Jacobs was published in 1924, clearly no longer under copyright, and it is published on the Internet under copyright by the "Digitale bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren" (dbnl). The problem is that they have the audacity to claim copyright. They claim copyright on everything they publish including work from the Middle Ages.
Copyright is a failure because important material like this picture of Aletta Jacobs are lost to us while people effectively steal the rights to her works by being bold. The dbnl does great work by making literature available on the Internet, they lose their goodwill by taking what is not theirs to take.
I found this image in the archive of the library of Congress, Durova restored it for me as a favour. I am disappointed that such unclear copyright prevents her work from making a difference.
PS this picture is a PNG.
Thanks,
GerardM
5 comments:
Hi Gerard,
can you point me to the relevant discussion on Commons?
Thanks,
Erik
Hi Erik, the relevant policy page is
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Copyright
Basically we would need to prove that the photographer's life ended in 1938 or earlier in order to upload this to Commons, or else get positive documentation that the subject of this photograph owned the copyright (in many cases professional portrait photographers retain copyright over their works). We haven't been able to find independent documentation of the photographer's lifespan, and can't assume he passed on within 14 years after this work was done.
In some cases it's possible to upload early twentieth century material locally to English Wikipedia under the pre-1923 rule in US law. Unlike Commons, en:wiki goes exclusively by US copyright law in its hosting policies. Unfortunately this is a 1924 photograph and doesn't fit within those rules. Writing up a fair use rationale wouldn't be worth the trouble because there's already a much lower quality portrait of her from 1915 that is public domain. Public domain material basically always wins out over copyrighted images, regardless of quality.
Hi Durova,
thanks for the explanation. I misread the post - I didn't appreciate that the root issue here was that we don't know the death date of the photographer. Indeed, such situations are very common, and only legislative reform can bring true clarity. Separately, I think it would be legitimate for the Wikimedia community to have a conversation about the 'gray area' of orphaned works where the copyright status cannot be reasonably determined.
I don't necessarily agree with some of the many copyright laws that exist today, but the law is the law I believe that everyone needs to know how to protect themselves against lawsuit's. Michael C. Donaldson's latest book, "Clearance and Copyright " is a great reference book for anyone who has questions about copyright laws.
A separate issue Gerard raises that we can do something about is copyfraud. A lot of organizations attempt to assert copyright claims over older work that is demonstrably in the public domain.
One reason I've done so much work with the Library of Congress archives is because they don't make those claims. As a result, dozens of images from their archives have run on Wikipedia main pages as Commons and English Wikipedia featured pictures. With help from the Foundation this could open doors.
What we need people to do is approach other libraries and museums and show them how much visibility this has gained for the Library of Congress collection, and let those organizations know you have people who'd be glad to do the same thing for other collections if they digitized material to a high technical standard and didn't attempt to stake a copyright claim that they really can't justify anyway.
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