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UK's National Portrait Gallery Threatens To Sue Wikipedia User
jpatokal writes "The National Portrait Gallery of London is threatening litigation against a Wikipedia user over his uploading of pictures of some 3,000 paintings, all 19th century or earlier and firmly in the public domain. Their claim? The photos are a 'product of a painstaking exercise on the part of the photographer,' and that downloading them off the NPG site is an 'unlawful circumvention of technical measures.' And remember, the NPG's taxpayer-funded mission is to 'promote the appreciation and understanding of portraiture in all media [...] to as wide a range of visitors as possible!'"
The paintings may be in the public domain, but the photographs are copyright to the photographer.
So good luck to the dipshit user who uploaded them.
I don't know if this is viable in London as I don't live there. But if it's remotely an option, then there are times when jury nullification is called for.
A good explanation of the concept can be found here.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I have to say that Firefox is getting a lot worse lately. The user experience is in serious need of improvement and development is the pits. I installed the latest "big deal" Firefox update on June 30th. (For some reason they skipped a full four secondary updates, but whatever.) Upon restarting, which took several minutes, I began using Firefox 3.5.
At first, Firefox seemed strangely familiar. I thought they had changed very little unnecessarily until I visited the Acid3 test. Lo and behold, I was still using Firefox 3.0.0.11. What the fuck? I manually invoked Check for Updates and repeated my first attempt only to find, upon restarting, the same thing.
Finally in desperation I downloaded the installer manually from Mozilla. The install ran surprisingly quickly and, after a few minutes, I was launched with the new version. I had to check, though, because again I thought it looked like very little had changed.
In fact, did Mozilla bother changing anything beside the JavaScript? The new TraceMonkey is great and all, but they could have at least made it look like they were working on something else. When the most noticeable improvement is the "Know Your Rights" button (which everyone ignores) one really starts to wonder what the fuss was all about.
Well, after the three tries it took to upgrade, I found my profile wouldn't migrate. This was a mess, but I was able to eventually retrieve my bookmarks from a long, arcane file path in a hidden directory. But then upon visiting my bookmarked sites I found that almost none of my add-ons are compatible with it. Therefore my browser is almost entirely functionless.
The bookmark tool itself could use a polishing. It's a mess and has been since version 1.0. If a browser is meant to render and organize content, Firefox surely falls down in this area. Why does it take me several minutes to slosh through the GUI just to make a new folder and alphabetize some bookmarks in it? Not to mention the damned Bookmarks toolbar, which takes up too much damn space and can't be turned off.
And speaking of the GUI, it's slow as Hell slowget rid of the proprietary XUL and just hardcode the damned interface already!
I also have to mention memory use. On my system, Firefox was swallowing an incredible 400 MB with only a simple HTML 4 table open. 400 MB?! I blame this on the Firefox team's use of C++, where memory management is about as easy as herding cats. Likewise Firefox is a slow, bloated nightmare. (For a contrast, there's Safari, which is written in Objective C and is very small and efficient.)
Most of the time I have heavy JavaScript sites open. I shudder to think how much Firefox eats then, and I'll be sure to check in the future. No wonder my system tends to slow down when I've left Firefox open for days on end with dynamically updating pages and RSS feeds. Clearly, Firefox leaks memory like a cracked sieve in a waterfall.
With Firefox smelling more and more like crapware, I started to dig a little, first on Wikipedia and then on the Mozilla Development Forums. It turns out that my observations are part of a larger pattern of Firefox quality issues and development customs. The Mozilla developers are a bunch of arrogant, abusive shitheads.
For starters, they're still running all tabs in the same process. This is something IE7 and Safari 3 have had right for years. So if a plugin crashes or a page takes forever to finish rendering, everything's stuck. You can't even switch tabs to another page! And Firefox 3.5 is a "milestone" release? Firefox 3.6 and 4 are milestones too, and process-per-tab isn't scheduled for either.
Developer interaction with Firefox users is stilted too. Sometimes
How is this modded Troll? It's a correct statement of U.K. law and relevant to the article. What, does using the word "dipshit" automatically make something a troll post? Honestly, come on Slashdot..
That depends on whether the moderator agrees with you. If they do, then it's alright. If they don't, they are highly offended by your use of foul language. That level of maturity, dispassionate review, and strong character is amazing is it not?
Fuck it, I get tired of seeing that too and I have karma to burn. The difference between a good mod and a bad mod is that the good ones focus on promoting desirable posts. If they want to mod me down for saying this then they waste their points which is fine by me.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
They aren't even derivative works. They're just copies. THEY'RE COPIES.
If you think that harvesting a few thousand images off of a website, then properly linking them into the Wikipedia is easy, then you clearly haven't tried making simple digital copies.
If you think that making a few thousand proper reproductions through photography or scanning is easy, then properly documenting building a gallery website out of those images is easy, then you clearly haven't tried bridging the analog and digital world.
A few things to consider: photography is hard, at least if you expect a decent result from it. You need to consider factors such as lighting and colour, and balance those out with the camera's limitations (such as the response curve of the photodetector to light and colour). Scanning a painting may make it easier, particularly when it comes to lighting and colour correction, but they can't exactly rush out an buy the cheapest model from the local discount electronics store. At the very least, you would need a large format scanner to handle most artwork. (Damn those artists who didn't paint on legal size paper, sometimes choosing a canvas that is just a fraction of an inch too deep.) Yet a commercial large format scanner probably wouldn't do the job either. You see, curators tend to be a wee bit finicky about what their collections are exposed to. They probably don't want to deal with the subtle alterations in the paint/dye chemistry that results from exposure to particular wavelengths of light or poor handling. I think that prior generations of curators and librarians learned from prior projects, such as the massive attempts to transfer works to microfiche or microfilm in decades past, that it is always best to maintain an original.
So while I have a hard time supporting the gallery's actions, I can also see that their digitization projects are non-trivial and that they probably should have the rights to deal with the results according to their own desires.