First case:
1) Three photos of mine of a decorative sculpture in the foyer of Phipps Conservatory & Botanical Gardens in Pittsburgh, US.
Photos:
Commons deletion discussion: here
Summary: modern art is copyrighted by artists (in this case, Dale Chihuly), that includes photos of it. There is no freedom of panorama in United States. This means that you cannot take pictures of Mr. Chihuly's works and share them with others, no matter how much you'd like to advertise his wonderful creations.
Outcome: photos will be deleted from Commons collection, which will entitle their removal from various articles, such as on Mr. Chihuly and Phipps Conservatory. Note how the copyright that is supposedly protecting the artists is in fact hurting them, in this case limiting the informative content of the primary reference work about them.
Current use examples:
Expect them to disappear soon.
Solution: wait 70 after Mr. Chihuly's death (unless copyright is retroactively extended, again...). Or contact him and ask for permission (assuming he is still the copyright holder and haven't sold the rights to that particular sculpture to the Gardens). Unfortunately, this is quite time consuming, and few Wikimedia volunteers take care of that, when so many other tasks need doing. I have done it myself a few times in the past, and on occasion managed to save an image or two, but it is a time consuming task (communicating with real person, with no guarantee they'll bother to reply, and then having to convince them to give permission to release the photos under a free license - which is likely a concept they've never heard of - and then have fun explaining why Wikimedia needs the commercial-use-allowed one... (because our ethics requires we explain to them what the free license we need entitles in detail...)). Compared to that, categorizing some images or translating descriptions is so much easier... sigh.
So Mr. Chihuly's article on Wikipedia will soon be gutted of all images of his works. Feel free to tell me how this benefits him :)
Note: This blog post is by no means intended as a jibe against Mr. Chihuly (who is almost certainly unaware of how the law is "protecting him"), nor against Wikimedia Commons (which being a non-profit organization on a donation budget cannot really risk being sued by somebody, with all the costs it incurs). It is however intended a a jibe against the current copyright system, showing how it is hurting all of us - artists and the public, both of which it claims to protect.
In the coming months, I intend on covering other media deletions from Commons (and maybe a few examples of when images were saved). Stay tuned,
2 comments:
I've run into this problem in the past - in France you can't even photograph buildings! One way out is to upload the photo to Wikipedia instead of to Commons, and add a fair-use rationale. If the art work is discussed in a Wikipedia article, then fair-use is typically allowed (since it has an educational purpose and doesn't diminish the object's commercial value).
The problem with that approach is that Wikipedia is trying to get rid of all fair use images (there should be a post by Jimbo somewhere along the lines "they must all go"). So fair use images get deleted from Wikipedia, slowly but steadily, so uploading them there is only a temporary solution (I plan on showcasing a few fair use images that got deleted from Wikipedia and would never be acceptable on Commons in future editions of my Civil Disobedience blog).
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