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German Gov't Donates 100,000 Images To Wikipedia
Raul654 writes "The German Federal Archive has agreed to donate 100,000 images to Wikipedia under the German version of the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License. These pictures cover a period from 1860 to present. This is the largest picture donation ever to Wikipedia, and possibly the largest in the history of the free culture movement."
Apparently, this is part of a project which will eventually make 11 million photos available for public use.
You would think that Governments--who exist to serve the people--would constantly look for avenues of already successful community sites as venues for returning information to the public. With privacy & security in mind, I wish that more governments would release this sort of stuff under a creative commons ... even if citizens of the world then have access to it, I don't think the taxpayers would mind. Wikipedia & other Wikimedia sites have shown to be very successful non-profit sites that are community owned and driven. Can anyone think of a good reason why we shouldn't extend the Freedom of Information Act a little further with recent advancements in communications and technology?
My work here is dung.
With all the stories over various entities trying to screw everyone over fair-use, such as the one over a state claiming copyright over their written laws,, this is a nice change. What I like about creative commons is that it is one way for a content holder to hold on to their 'rights', yet allow the material to be used by the general public. This saves our culture being lost in the cellars of town hall or of those of some other 'IP owner'.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Wrong stereotype I'm afraid. I think this action will affect pictures like this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Einsatzgruppen_Killing.jpg
So hopefully clusterfucks like this won't happen in future
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/Image:Einsatzgruppen-Killingfull.jpg
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Is there any way to get direct access to these images without going through the Wikimedia webpage, i.e. a torrent containing them all or so?
For any German speakers out there: Most (all?) of these pictures lack English captions. I'm sure the people on Commons could use all the assistance they can get translating the German captions (especially into English). You can register an account on Commons and help.
Also, props go to Wikimedia Deutchland, which arranged this donation.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I can't say if it was a decisive factor in this particular image donation, but that's one of the arguments free-content proponents have been using to try to get other governments to open up at least some portion of their images: pointing out that since there is this large public-domain repository of US government images, if they want to promote their history and culture on par with that of the US, they need to provide us with a similarly high-quality, free-licensed collection of images.
Otherwise a large portion of generic examples are going to be US-based ones, simply because they gave us the images whereas other countries didn't.
Sometimes it leads to almost comical results, where dozens of other countries' leaders, ministers, and other figures are illustrated on Wikipedia by a photograph of them shaking hands with Reagan or Carter or Kissinger or whoever, because that US-visit photograph was freely released by the US State Department, while their photographs from back home are under a more restrictive copyright.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Well, its the government, what else do they do? :)
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Some of the captions are in need of being rewritten into a reasonable form even in German, especially older ones that are either out of date or hilariously biased. The worst are probably those that were apparently entered during World War II and never updated.
For example, this one (which has in fact been updated), originally came with a caption that reads roughly:
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
While CC is far better than not available under any simple terms, it is far from ideal imo.
What if I want to use an image as a wallpaper (cropped, maybe gamma dimmed)? Do I need to provide a webserver where all the working versions of the image are downloadable?
Or if I use an image in a computer game? Where it's appearance dependes on the state in the game? What versions of the images do I need to give out? In any form as it *can* appear in the game (this could be thousands)? Must the game be released under CC as well?
I agree the original caption should be retained for historical purposes, but Wikimedia Commons images also have captions, which are intended to be neutral and descriptive. So one of those should be written as well, if the original caption doesn't fit those criteria.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It may well be the case that that would not be possible without a law change and those take time.
Some of the captions are in need of being rewritten into a reasonable form even in German, especially older ones that are either out of date or hilariously biased. The worst are probably those that were apparently entered during World War II and never updated.
If one of these pops up, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_joke, we will need to be very careful about the translation!
Each translator should only be exposed to two words, each.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
That is an interesting link, and beyond the value of the content, it also shows the evils of our dysfunctional copyright. The arguments that this photo should not be lost because it chronicles one of our (as in the human race) despicable moments are valid. I would also say that it is just as bad to let our chronicles of good and happiness be destroyed as it is to let chronicles of evil and shame.
So, this photo SHOULD be in the public domain, but so should works that are not chronicles of shame. For example, it is a travisty that the 'Happy Birthday' song is still under copyright.
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike is not exactly an onerous or hard-to-comply-with license. It is also fairly easy to understand and interpret (unlike, say, the GFDL).
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I'd say the link shows more the evil of people who give too much value to ideology (in this case, following a internal and arbitrary policy) over common sense.
It is good to see they are not excluding things from the Nazi Era. That is as important historically as any other period and should not be forgotten.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
I suppose "German Invasion of Poland" always sounds better than "Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact Joint German-Soviet Invasion of Poland in 1939."
Since you refer to "Freedom of Information Act" I'm assuming you're speaking in an American context.
We already do this. Look here:
United States Library of Congress
The National Archives
Perhaps I'm not giving enough credit to Wikipedia/Wikimedia, but I haven't heard much about involvment by professional preservationists who know how to catalog and preserve the stuff, even in a digital context. I speak of the hardcore phd librarian and historian/librarian hybrid types who know how to do this stuff.
>100 years old doesn't necessarily mean that the image is out of copyright. In Germany (just like in the rest of the EU) copyright expires 70 years after the death of the author. So if someone took some photos in 1890 at the age of 20 and died in 1960, copyright wouldn't expire until January 1st 2031.
Take the works of Leni Riefenstahl for example. She created many Nazi propaganda movies, like Triumph of Will. She died in 2003, so her works won't be in the public domain until January 1st 2074.
The Angels have the Phone Box
I don't know about public domain, but certainly the unrestricted use of such images should be permitted under "fair use" provisions of any sane copyright law. Like the image of the American flag raised out of the rubble of the WTC, or the image of the naked Vietnamese girl running to escape the bombing, or the image of the firefighter saving a small child from the wreckage of the Oklahoma Federal building -- these images are all copyrighted but there's no way the copyright holders would be able to prevent their use in an encyclopedia or other work of scholarship or commentary.
That Heilmann worked for the German Democratic Republic's Ministry for State Security has been well known for a while, he is objecting to claims on Wikipedia that he was a pornographer and the like, which there is very little evidence of. Someone said it better than I could
He never wanted to block the whole german Wikipedia.
The wrong article got attention due to the press and the editors actually saw that the content was wrong and fixed it.
He didn't complain about anything about his stasi-past. He apologized afterwards for the blockade, saying he never wanted to affect so many people or hide anything.
What would you do if you had a Wikipedia page with a wrong (and citation-free) content and wikipedias policy says, you can't change it.
What does this have to do with the collaboration between Wikimedia Germany Company and the German government that has gone on for several years (they donated several images before), tell me?
Indeed. And in fact the summary at the end of that deletion request points out that the image can indeed be used under "fair use". But when a perfectly reasonable question such as "is this image in the public domain" can result in responses such as "if you delete this image then you're a nazi", it really does make you question whether the absurd copyright laws that would restrict this image are any worse than the masses that would argue against them. And while not all the answers were that bad, the overwhelming majority of them chose to deliberate ignore the question that had been put forward, to answer a completely different (and completely irrelevant) one. One can't help but conclude that common sense simply isn't all that common these days.
Santa's suicide mission go!
They seem to be missing images between 1939 and 1945...
The US government releases its stuff as public domain material.
The EU governments do not. UK government has Crown Copyright. Other governments have normal copyright. (IANAL).
This means that as free culture gets more popular and people spend more of their time reading free publications rather than proprietary publications, the US government has a hige advantage in being able to provide these free publications with free content, effectively projecting the US culture to the world.
But the EU governments do not have this ability so easily, they cannot easily project their culture to the world through free publications because their cultural works are not free.
Governments know very well how important it is to project their culture to the world (this is why all governments open offices or companies in other countries that promote their language, etc), and EU governments understand that now that free publications are on the rise and people get more influenced by free publications than by proprietary publications, they must do anything possible to be able to influence the free publications in promoting their own culture instead of the US culture.
EU governments are now realising that their restrictive copyright that applies to government material places them at a disadvantage compared to the US in influencing world culture. The obvious solution is to change their laws, but this may take time, so for the short-term the EU governments may be thinking that making specific donations under a free licence is a good idea while they are trying to decide how best to balance the US cultural dominance in free publications (because the US federal stuff is free, many wikis and other free publications make extensive use of US federal stuff, effectivelly helping promoting the US culture and the US government's worldview and history).
But such moves are not enough. You can't beat the US public domain cultural projection with one-off free donations of cultural works. EU governments must quickly make all their stuff public domain by default if they want people in the world to be influenced more by EU culture and not only by US culture.
What's insane is that some of the arguments presented were very valid -- including that anonymous Nazi photos were considered public domain, a point completely ignored by the final reviewer(s).
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
So, what's going on in this picture from 1936? here
Well, I was going to say PacMan, but I figured that that would create a stream of "You just want something for free", and there are less people that are as emotionally attached.
But "unrestricted use" was not the question. The question was "is this under a Wikimedia Commons-accepted free license or public domain". They didn't delete the picture because they couldn't use it, they deleted it because it collided with their rulebook. This was not a case of overbearing copyright law, it was simply a case of beaureaucracy.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
For the same reason you can't register a company in the United States as a Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung: There is no such thing in our law. We have the similar concept of Gemeinfreiheit but German copyright is mandatory: You create a work, it's protected. Gemeinfreiheit reduces the protection but only applies to certain government resources.
A free licence is the best thing you can do in Germany - except for waiting for the work's copyright to run out, which may well take centuries if the terms keep getting extended. Since even the WW2 pictures are not old enough to lose copyright protection CC really was one of the best options they had.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Before someone points out that an LLC is very similar to a GmbH: Yes, I should have used something like Kommanditgesellschaft instead. I only noticed the blunder after posting.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
I wrote about this at length here:
"Re: Do artifacts (even money) have politics? (German WWII example with Hans Posse)
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/62929d07d2c68be5
but this goes to show the unexpected creative sparks that can fly from these sorts of efforts.
From there: :-) ... Scherl picture service Dr. Hans Posse, the new ... ... ... ...
"""
So, yesterday, I looked at probably thousands of thumbnails, just flipping
through page after page of the uncategorized ones for over an hour,
occasionally looking at enlarged ones. I saw smiling faces and people proud
of their accomplishments in agriculture, construction, sports, child-rearing
and so on. My parents are both from the Netherlands (Holland), but I
undoubtedly have ancestors from Germany at some point given my last name,
and I learned German in school as it was the closest thing offered to Dutch,
so I could guess at some of the captions for the few I looked at.
I kept seeing faces here or there which reminded me of relatives. My wife
agreed this one looked a lot like me:
"Dr. Hans Posse, 1910"
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-2003-0709-500,_Dr._Hans_Posse.jpg
"Scherl Bilderdienst Dr. Hans Posse, der neue Direktor der Dresdener
Gemäldegalerie. 1910.
director of the Dresdener picture gallery. 1910."
But here is a picture of him standing next to Hitler I just found this moment by coincidence through
Google as I tried to look up his bio:
"Posse (links [left]) mit Hitler"
http://residence.aec.at/rax/kun_pol/UND/BIOS/posse.html
Thought-provoking stuff to see someone who looks a lot like you standing
next to Hitler... Especially if you *also* have relatives who perished in
concentration camps...
As I flipped through those pictures, and knowing a little about history, I
realized that WWII could not have happened without the manufacturing
competence of the German people; they needed their tanks and submarines and
synthetic fuel from coal plans to work well. They also needed effective
logistics for their military plans, and so they needed intellectual
competence too. But, the Germans would not have invaded other countries
without some less positive world views too -- both a sense of superiority
and a sense, from World War One, of previous unfair treatment. (Echoes of
Iraq for the USA?) It's been said that intelligence is knowing how to do
things, wisdom is knowing what is worth doing, and virtue is actually doing
it. So, the Germans in WWII and the times leading up to it then had
intelligence and a sort of hard-working virtue, but not a lot of good wisdom.
If the Germans had not been individually and collectively competent at
industrial arts, WWII would not have happened. But if they had not had gone
beyond pride into arrogance (thinking collectively they had a right to
others land from some innate superiority), then it would not have happened
either. Anyway, that's a lesson for US Americans to reflect on too, with all
too many parallels to those times in some ways.
"""
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
That reminds me of a tourist boat trip on the river Spree through central Berlin a few years back. The ship travelled along buildings like the Bundeskanzleramt (seat of the German chancellor) and lots of old and rebuild buildings.
On the first part of the tour, the tour guide told the tourists a lot about the history of those buildings and talked alot about how badly Berlin in general and those specific buildings were damaged during WW2 and how much it had cost to rebuild them. All this stuff was told in German language. On the return trip, the tour guide was talking in English. But curiously, he talked about lots of things, but hardly ever mentioned WW2 or how much destruction it had caused.
They probably didn't want to constantly remind tourists of those dark times... And I can't blame them for that.
The Angels have the Phone Box