Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-07-13/Open letter

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Open letter

Working with, not against, cultural institutions

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By
Orderinchaos, Mathias Schindler
Editor's note: rather than a typical Signpost news article, which should eschew taking sides in matters of opinion within the community, this is an open letter expressing the opinion of its authors on how the Wikimedia community ought to interact with cultural institutions like galleries, libraries, archives, and museums.
Portrait of German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, donated under a copyleft license by the Bundesarchiv.

Recently the

National Portrait Gallery in London issued a legal threat against an administrator from Wikimedia Commons. This has attracted attention from free culture enthusiasts; the threat was discussed on the front page of Slashdot this week.[1]
The matter probably also has the attention of other museums and archives that hold similar collections. On one level the threat is an issue of differing interpretations of copyright law. The two groups each have strong reasons for holding differing views: one believes unsupportable copyright claims are hampering access to valuable information, the other has traditionally depended on sales of reproduction copies to help cover the costs of curating its physical collections of historic artworks. Free culture and curation also have the potential for cooperation, though, since both share a goal of providing information to the public. In other words, when the talk is about partnering, about sharing values, about bringing our cultural heritage to our shared public, we may be able to move forward together.

As a legal matter, many of the claims currently erected by archives and institutions are untested. Some individuals on both sides would like to see the matter play out in court. An international network of Wikimedia volunteers, represented on the English Wikipedia by projects such as Wikipedia Loves Art and WikiProject Media Restoration, and in Australia with the Backstage Pass and the upcoming "GLAM-WIKI: Finding the common ground" event, have been working toward a cooperative approach with museums and archives. By earning the institutions' trust and developing ways to make greater openness workable for these institutions, this network of volunteers aims to create an environment where the institutions dismantle their own defensive legal claims.

Part of the challenge is to understand the institutions' needs. Even the ones that receive heavy subsidies also remain dependent upon image reproduction sales. For the National Portrait Gallery, its picture library income for TY2007–08 was £378,000.[2] From the perspective of the institutions, that goes toward paying for secure storage and temperature controls and other necessities to preserve their collections for future generations, and for the specialist staff necessary to ensure the maintenance and development of the collections. Digitization and the Internet are changing those economics. One way for institutions to respond is defensive: they are not under obligation to scan material or upload digital files on the Internet, and can charge service fees for doing so. Even when they do, the majority of archival material at most of these institutions remains undigitized and often uncatalogued. In the long run, the most effective way of gaining access to archival material will probably be by gaining the trust of these institutions and by showing them ways that openness is workable for them.

One example is the

CC-by-sa 3.0 license while it retained full copyright over the higher resolution originals. Since that donation its sales of high resolution images have increased significantly. Each image hosting page contains a link back to the Bundesarchiv as a source, so people who have an interest in higher resolution material have gone to Bundesarchiv to purchase copies. Also, the Commons community have been submitting improvements
to the Bundesarchiv's metadata which get imported back into their catalogue. The result is a mutually beneficial relationship.

Another way to build relationships is to restore slightly damaged material. The following example is a restoration of an artwork that ran on the cover of Life magazine in January 1910. The scan was made directly from the artist's original.

  • Coles Phillips
  • Unrestored version: stained at lower left.
    Unrestored version: stained at lower left.
  • Restored image.
    Restored image.

The unrestored version has no resale value due to stain damage, but the restored version is suitable for posters, mouse pads, etc. The Wikimedia community has a growing team of volunteer restorationists who donate high quality services in order to motivate institutions to open their collections to the public. If a restored image gets selected as a featured picture, as this one has, it eventually runs on Wikipedia's main page. That gains additional attention for the donating institution and its collection. By restoring selected showpiece examples, Wikimedians motivate institutions to make large donations to Wikimedia Commons.

These are two of several approaches that Wikimedia volunteers have been employing to open greater access to media content. Without acting in ways that would validate disputed rights claims, these volunteers seek solutions that give the institutions reasons to dismantle the barriers themselves. Wikimedia Commons is not the only organization that seeks these donations. Flickr, a commercial website, has a paid staff that is seeking the same material. As Noam Cohen of The New York Times noted earlier this year, Flickr and Commons are competing for similar donations.[3] Each site brings a different set of advantages to the table. In theory, it makes sense for one nonprofit institution to build a relationship with another nonprofit in preference to a commercial website. In practice, the outcome may depend upon whether Wikimedians adopt a cooperative or a confrontational approach. Possibly within the next year, either Flickr or Commons will gain enough momentum to become the dominant venue for archival image donations.

In the broader picture, openness increases the possibilities of new discoveries arising from better communication. Earlier this year the Signpost

Hotel Del Coronado of Coronado, California pieced together a panorama by noted photographer William Henry Jackson
that had been forgotten in archival collections and was unknown to the hotel's own staff. A Library of Congress librarian wrote about the Wounded Knee discovery, "You can imagine that among a collection of 14 million items here, there are a lot of secrets waiting to be uncovered!"

Hotel del Coronado, Coronado, California. Restored photochrom by William Henry Jackson.

References

  1. ^ "UK's National Portrait Gallery Threatens To Sue Wikipedia User". Slashdot. July 11, 2009. Retrieved July 14, 2009.
  2. ISBN 978 0 10 295746 4
    . Retrieved July 14, 2009.
  3. ^ Cohen, Noam (January 18, 2009). "Historical Photos in Web Archives Gain New Lives". The New York Times. Retrieved July 14, 2009.
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Disclaimer

Wikipedia:No disclaimers in articles about says it all. There is no need for the hatnote, and the accompanying news article is deliberately without a disclaimer. Physchim62 (talk) 22:31, 13 July 2009 (UTC)[reply
]

I think it's unnecessary personally given that "an open letter" suggests it represents an opinion from the people involved. But it doesn't bother me that much :) Orderinchaos 05:32, 14 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
It only bothers me for the pieces that don't have a disclaimer, which are often as least, if not more, controversial than this one! Physchim62 (talk) 14:03, 14 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thoughts

Hi all, good article. I'm the user targeted by the NPG notice, and I want to emphasise that, despite the NPG incident, I do support friendly cooperation between museums/archives and Wikipedia users, and I have collaborated effectively with both TIME-LIFE and the New York Public Library in the past. This is by far the better path for everyone involved - no negative press and no legal risk - and it is the only way to legally obtain reproductions of copyrighted works. Where an acceptable agreement can be reached, I encourage everyone to do so. Dcoetzee 04:31, 14 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The tone of this article is quite good. Some of the disputed images (incl one of the brontë sisters) have also been effectively cleaned up. +sj+ 07:48, 14 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, that one is my own work. :-) Dcoetzee 09:52, 14 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Hi Dcoetzee, thanks for the feedback. If there's a way the cooperative approach can help you off the hot seat, would really love to pursue that. Durova277 13:51, 14 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

The institutions' needs

First let me say that I very much applaud the idea to reach out in a diplomatic, non-confrontational manner and I think this letter, for the most part, does a good job of describing the mutual benefits of cooperation instead of litigation between those institutions and the Wikimedia community. I am aware of the tremendous work that two of the letter's signatories have done in this area. (It might also have been worthwhile to mention that the Wikimedian behind the Bundesarchiv negotiations, Mathias Schindler, has been hired by Wikimedia Deutschland mainly to work on more such cooperations.)

However, I was a bit puzzled by the following part:

Part of the challenge is to understand the institutions' needs. Even the ones that receive heavy subsidies also remain dependent upon image reproduction sales. For the National Portrait Gallery, its picture library income for TY2007–08 was £378,000.[1]

I am not sure if the author of these lines has met this part of the challenge successfully. According to the same source, the total income of the National Portrait gallery during TY2007-08 was £16,610,000, of which the picture library income amounted to 2,3%. The claim that the NPG "remains dependent" on these 2,3% needs further explanation.

It is also instructional to compare the quoted figure to two other figures in the same table (table 2c on p.43):

  • £290,000 income from the Catering franchise
  • £321,000 income from "Gallery hire" (which seems to mean renting space for corporate events to companies, many of which are named here on p.25).

In other words, selling food and allowing parties in the buildings owned by the NPG generated much more income (£611,000) than selling reproduction rights for the pictures owned by the NPG (£378,000), but both are just a very small part of the NPG's overall income.

And assuming that the picture library income for a large part comes from copyrighted images, not public domain ones, one could speculate that the possible financial benefit from a successful litigation against Dcoetzee (even if would lead to the deletion of all those images from Wikimedia's servers) would be less than, say, the yearly cost for the NPG's "substantial investment in cataloguing and digitising the Collection", as described on p.15 of the annual report [1].

Regards, HaeB (talk) 11:52, 14 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

That's a very interesting analysis. Ultimately you'd have to ask the museum staff about why they prioritize the way they do. Someone on Commons also speculated that the cost of going to court would outweigh the funds they earn this way. Durova277 13:59, 14 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
That might have been me, I can't remember, but it's certainly an argument I've used on other forums. Don't forget as well that the £378,000 pounds is income, not profits. The NPG has two staff members to pay out of this money before it can bank it as profit. Physchim62 (talk) 14:06, 14 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Good point. Looking again into the annual report, it says on p.17:
The Picture Library delivered sales of some £400,000, rendering a surplus, less costs, in excess of £130,000 during difficult conditions in publishing, television and media markets, and during implementation, without interruption to service, of the first instalment of a new two-part computer system.
(An explanation for the slightly differing amounts might perhaps be that £378,000 is the "some £400,000" with VAT deducted?)
So the actual financial gain from selling reproducton rights would only be about one third of the amount quoted in the open letter.
Regards, HaeB (talk) 21:03, 14 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The difference between the two figures is a simple rounding-off, which is quite normal between a set of accounts and an annual report! That would give an average of £45k in total staff costs (important point: not salary, and much less take-home pay) per staff member (of whom there are six, in fact, not two as I speculated above). That's reasonable, in fact it's pretty cheap for central London.
Obviously there's no breakdown of "bestselling portraits", but I think it's fair to say that the NPG's picture library is going to continue to exist whatever the outcome of this dispute. It's also fair to say that it is only a very minor contributor to the NPG's finances. The NPG doesn't "need" its picture library in order to stay afloat (thank goodness). Physchim62 (talk) 00:39, 15 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Meanwhile, the NPG told The Guardian that "The projected gross revenue from fees in 2008/9 was over more [sic] than £339,000." That number is actually down from 2007/2008, so apparently the "difficult conditions" haven't improved since then. And it said that "it would be happy for the online site to use low-resolution images but was 'very concerned' about loss of revenue from copyright fees for the high-resolution versions, which form a significant part of its income", which again poses the question what "significant" means here.
And thanks to a 2009 Freedom of Information Act request we know that in the five years from 2004/5 to 2008/9 the "income received by the National Portrait Gallery in consideration of the use of National Portrait Gallery collection images on third party websites" was even smaller, remaining between £11,000 and £19,000.
Going back to the general question, I also tried to find numbers for the
Bundesarchiv (prompted by GerardM's claim
that "the Bundesarchiv [relies] on selling their high resolution material").
Of the Bundesarchiv's €50 million budget, in 2007 only €453,000 (less than 1%) came from fees or charges. And many of these (as regulated in the "Cost Regulations", BArchKostV) seem not to come from selling reuse rights, but from fees to use the facilities (rooms) of the archive, for research requests, and for the making (not: reuse) of reproductions. (Cf. [2]) So I would guess that their revenue from image reproduction sales is closer to 0.1% than 1% of the overall budget.
Regards, HaeB (talk) 00:08, 18 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Well said, Physchim62: thank goodness indeed. 2000 pixel wide copies are useless to producers of art books and prints - and I read elsewhere (on Commons?) that the US federal museums still sell plenty of their own art books, prints and so on made of public domain artwork. If NPG surrenders its claims, I am glad that the numbers suggests that the NPG's mission to the UK taxpayer and to the world is unlikely to be under threat.

If you write a follow-up article to this letter (or you rework it to submit it to other media) you might be interested in these links a Wikipedian shared, giving a more detailed breakdown of the NPG's rights business, and its digitization effort.

While the NPG's rights business in public domain paintings is small, other art owners and photo library operators may well be interested in seeing Dcoetzee or a similar defendant taken to court: according to one website, millions of dollars changed hands in rights deals for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel!

--InfantGorilla (talk) 05:29, 16 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I just called up some images on the NPG website: what is the difference from doing the same on WP? Given that the facility to transfer images/music/other information exists, the organisations have to reach some compromise.

Turning the argument around - WP, if it provides viable low-pixel resolution images and correctly sources the owners of the original object (from which high-pixel versions can be obtained) is not WP providing free marketing for the owners? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.104.132.41 (talk) 08:51, 16 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Free marketing, free web hosting, free localisation to dozens of languages, free digital restoration, free integration into international educational materials, free incoming links and Google PageRank, and so on! Lets hope NPG calls the lawyers off. --InfantGorilla (talk) 14:49, 16 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

'Using a hammer to crack a nut' can backfire (to construct a mixed metaphor), pursuing the case beyond 'a reasonable compromise' is likely to annoy a lot of people and 'activities by some people considering themselves jokers.'

The point perhaps, is that we do not hear from 'owners and keepers of objects' who look at the article and decide that whatever is 'lost' with a 'low pixel image' is more than compensated by the benefits mentioned by InfantGorilla and merely add links or otherwise seek the indirect benefits provided. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.104.132.41 (talk) 09:12, 17 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Helping Institutions Market their goodies

I'm a bit lost in all of this. I guess because we don't seem to have any of these problems in Australia. In fact we seem to have the opposite problem. Our institutions won't let up in aggregating everything they've got and trying to stick it on one page. Whereas, I would have thought all the average wikipedia (etc) reader would want would be an 'Images' link in the references (or top) or a few thumbnails on every page.

I don't even understand why we need to upload stuff (to the Commons) which is normally lying around an institutional site. I thought, on the web, all we want is an assurance that a file is going to stay still at one institution.gov url, so we can point to it, always, or code a page to suck it in. That is, unless the institution's digital curator can see the advantages of duplicating in a different domain, like the german archivists.

I appreciate that the National portrait gallery's curators are, like every institution, having a hard time coming to terms with the meaning of 'digital'. But i fail to understand why we would bother focussing on those with a most conservative nature, when the progressives are going nuts trying to figure out what 'their' community wants, what 'our' community wants.

Let's face it; There are a lot of things to do besides uploading the pictures

Thank goodness for GLAMourous events. --Simonfj (talk) 23:08, 17 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Well, the Wikimedia sites are configured so that images will only display if they are uploaded locally or at Wikimedia Commons. It's also commonly considered impolite to "hotlink" images. If we want to actually display images in an article, rather than merely link to them, then they will need to be uploaded. It can also serve as a kind of back-up archive (admittedly an ad-hoc one). --pfctdayelise (talk) 04:22, 3 August 2009 (UTC)[reply]


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  1. ISBN 978 0 10 295746 4
    . Retrieved July 14, 2009.
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