About and Public Domain Manifesto

Hi, this is Swivelchair. I work in the biopharma area. Not a scientist, not a journalist, mostly in the business aspects. I have a science and business background, and have been involved in a variety of biotechnology-related ventures.

My other blog is “Neurological Correlates – A Neuroscience Tabloid of Dysfunctional Behavior – Mostly Psychopaths, Narcissists, Obesity and Addiction“and the companion video site, Psychoanalyst.tv

One of my hobbies is curating out-of-copyright scientific illustration, now that there are so many digital image databases on the web.

I’ve taken care to ensure that the images collected here are either pre-1922, or else works created on behalf of the US government. It is my belief that there are no copyright infringing works here, but if anyone thinks I’m mistaken, please send me an e mail and I’ll remove the image.

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The waiver (sorry) and position statement: Use your common sense. Of course, please know that there are no “reps or warranties” that someone won’t come out of the wood work and claim to own a copyright of any of the images, and I can’t make any representations as to whether there are any mistakes made here, or if ex-US copyrights are somehow going to come into play. *Sigh* I guess we live in a world where we have to do this. Nothing here is to be considered a legal opinion, etc. you all know the drill. If you are going to sink big time money, or make life-altering decisions based on the images in this site or any other site, one word: don’t. To the best of my knowledge, these images are public domain. Nevertheless, as with any new technology which eliminates the middle man, there are vested interests in the old way of making money. There are some entities that would like to take really old 2 dimensional works, take a photo (albeit, a professional photo), and then claim: “Gotcha. New copyright, pay me. ”

My own view is that this is wrong: the whole point of copyright law is that it only lasts for a period of time, not forever. If copyright lasted forever, then there would be no dissemination of new ideas, because everyone would be frozen afraid to be sued — among a zillion other reasons. Plus copyright rewards creativity — not work. If copyright rewarded the amount of work, then a high-throughput scanner could be an author. Copyright rewards the tangible embodiment of creativity — even if you only wake up and do that creative thing in a fog for one second and then fall asleep or watch Best Week Ever all day long, as some aux Chateau Swivelchair are wont to do. You can be brilliantly creative and hardly work at all. This is what many people strive for and copyright protects that.

Think: would DaVinci be thrilled with the British libraries and other places that claim: “Gotcha! All the world has enjoyed your work for millenia, but now that we paid to hire a really good photographer who knows how to light it to take a really good photo (hint: for a 2 d object, not that big a deal, it ain’t John and Yoko in bed) we get to own the rights again! “ Da Vinci — who isn’t British, may I remind you – puts his genius down on paper, and you have some schmoo photographer (ok, sorry, but ain’t no DaVinci) take a photo of the paper, and you say, “Gotcha! We own the Da Vinci rights because our taxpayer money bought the original and we control who gets to see it, so we’re the only ones who can take a picture of it, so there, pay me, cash dollars, thank you very much.”

This is wrong on so many levels. There is a degree of creativity in a DaVinci work. If it were junk, so what, no one would care. A hung over photographer without coffee can set up a camera on a stand, and have the lighting, such that all day long 2 dimensional works on paper can be photographed using the same conditions, plus or minus. It doesn’t matter what’s on the paper, or the creative genius that went into it. All that matters is the light meter. It could be a drawing done by me (to state the least valuable thing I could imagine). Did you ever go to get your senior prom photos taken? There’s a long line of people, all plus or minus the same conditions — and those are 3 d objects (mostly, some admittedly have fewer dimensions, but that’s irrelevant for a photo). Ain’t no Leonardo taking those photos.

Institutions do have an argument: “We spent good money digitizing these — like a zillion dollars! Now we should control who gets to print these out or copy these digitally!”

My answer: Show me the money. Was it my taxpayer money (including VAT) that paid for (a) the original acquisition of the object; (b) the scanning/photography; and (c) again, for the rights to put up the scan on my web site? So, England and I’m naming names here – England and the Netherlands and France — and Spain, too — should the US keep out British and French and Dutch and Spanish citizens from copying the US stuff that US taxes paid for?

And don’t say the US doesn’t have any good culture, we have, um. . . really good stuff. I’ll think of it later.

Here’s another argument: It’s private funds, from rich people.

My Answer: Then give back any tax deductions you take. If you claim that private money gives you the right to make profit on the things you buy with it then to me that indicates you are not an non-profit institution. Just pay the back taxes and we’ll call it square. More than that, it’s usually private commingled with taxpayer money. After all, taxpayer money keeps the lights on at these places, or pays student subsidies, or pays for NIH grants that allows these institutions to operate. Without public support, there probably would be no private donations. So for all the boards of directors of museums and libraries, did my taxes (including VAT) pay for the original acquisition, then pay for the digitizing, and now have to pay again to post it on my web site?

This goes for the private institutions in the US, too, Yale and Stanford I’m talking to you. Does my taxpayer money fund any of your research? Yes it does, and a portion of all those NIH grants goes to overhead, and that pays the bills including some salaries.

And don’t even bring up your investment arms. Didn’t taxpayers just bail out your genius endowments via the TARP and other money supporting the financial services industry? I won’t even go there, but it seems to me that private institutions with investment arms get plenty of taxpayer support.

Forget copyright. It’s a plain vanilla breach of the website contract when you download an image from (say) a British museum website that sez “no copying” and put it up in your blog. So sez the Brits. Isn’t this an adhesion contract giving the user no bargaining power whatsoever, and offered on a take it or leave it basis — the kind of contract that I think is frowned upon in the sunny state of California? Where you have a contract between an organization that holds all the power and an individual, and the contract that says, “agree or be sued,” that’s a problem. Particularly where the contract deals with something that has such a strong public interest.

Sorry readers and viewers, scrapbookers and rock and rollers, Southerners and New Yorkers and Australians and Canadians – now that there seems to be some scrapes with Wikimedia, I wanted to post this manifesto. I feel the same way about scientific research done with public money that is then published behind a paywall. If I (representing taxpayers generally) paid for the research, I shouldn’t have to pay to see the results.

Please see (for example):

Wikimedia Commons:Reuse of PD-Art photographs

Open Content Alliance

Archives or Assets? by Peter B. Hirtle, Cornell University, 58th president of the Society of American Archivists, (N.B.:President Peter B. Hirtle presented an abbreviated version of this address at the opening plenary session of the 67th annual meeting of the Society of American Archivists in Los Angeles on Aug. 21, 2003.)

User:Dcoetzee/NPG Legal Threat

Swivelchair note: My understanding is that the British National Portrait Gallery authorities claim that taking a photo of a 2 dimensional object is itself sufficiently creative to author a new copyrightable work and have threatened an individual, the person who runs Wikimedia gallery, with legal action. As such, I am threatened by the threats to others have removed items which readers might otherwise enjoy seeing (like some photographs of 2 dimensional currency from France).

A message to British and other European Boards of Directors and legislative authorities:

Are you crazy?

You now have a commoditized product. Just like a generic drug. The key is low margins and large volume. And believe me, there could be huge volume if you made these images accessible. Probably a public utility model is best – low user fee based on consumption, just like you pay for water (of course here in SoCal we’re in a drought, and there’s a surcharge for watering you lawn too long. . .)

First, Vintage Printable is doing you a favor by indexing these images. Would you rather pay for that? OK, then pay me. I charge a zillion dollars an hour, and so there is a benefit conferred. If the public sees these images there’s way more public awareness. Hint: the public is on Perez Hilton, not on the British Museum website.

Second, there’s demand for the use of these, but not by the crowd that will pay a zillion dollars for a print — in fact, most of the users don’t live anywhere near the British museum and aren’t rare book antiquarians. Maybe you can charge a zillion dollars and a nice big VAT, and pay the lawyers to go around sending nastygrams. Good luck with that. How about trying the crafters? There’s a big Etsy crafty crowd for these images. Get an Etsy store. Better yet, sell Etsy stuff on your website. Even better yet, give jobs to some unemployed British artists so they can use the images for free in their art work, and sell stuff and advertise on your site or even sell stuff in your museum store. Shutting down Wikimedia Commons is dumb, dumb, dumb (To steal an appropriate quote from Dianne Feinstein from when she was Mayor of SF, see the last paragraph here for an example).

Museums and libraries: Do you not have business experience because you’re so busy giving fundraisers and getting free money? Is that why you’re spending it on your high priced, shiney-shoed, slick hair lawyers (or Solicitors or Barristers, whatever) that say things like, “That’s like comparing apples and Thaaahsdays” (I actually worked with a Barrister who said that with a straight face. I digress. )

Even Monty Python figured it out, to quote them:

. . .For 3 years you YouTubers have been ripping us off, taking tens of thousands of our videos and putting them on YouTube. Now the tables are turned. It’s time for us to take matters into our own hands.

We know who you are, we know where you live and we could come after you in ways too horrible to tell. But being the extraordinarily nice chaps we are, we’ve figured a better way to get our own back: We’ve launched our own Monty Python channel on YouTube. . .

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Be that as it may . . . also included are my various modifications of public domain works, mostly colorizing the images (you’ll see). These are licensed with creative commons non-commercial attribution license.

Although individual works are believed to be totally public domain and can be copied freely, please understand that you do not have permission to wholesale copy major portions of my site, including collections of organized works. For example, works that were part of a single book now out of copyright are free to be copied, but from time to time I have selected those images and added to additional images for aesthetic and organizational purposes. If you are going to copy works in bulk this way, please know that that copying is licensed under a non-commercial attribution license — thanks much. From CreativeCommons.org:

Vintage Printable by Vintage Printable is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at VintagePrintable.com. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://vintageprintable.com/wordpress.