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. ” There is a nascent companion video site, Psychoanalyst.tv, too.

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 steer clear of any copyright issues as far as I can tell, and most of the images collected here are either pre-1923, or else works created on behalf of the US government. I rely also on what others say, like Flickr Commons or Wikimedia Commons, the Library of Congress and other sources. Alas, we have waivers and disclaimers and you are responsible for your own use of the images.

If any one wants any image removed please send me an e mail with your reasons, and more than likely the image will be removed.

*************

Updated August 2010: 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 or any other right in any of the images, and I can’t make any representations as to whether there are any mistakes made here, or if ex-US cultural or other laws 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.

Public domain images by definition have no copyright restriction on use in the U.S.

Nevertheless, as with any new technology that 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. Mere duplication shouldn’t count as creativity. 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 [Housewives of Orange County, New Jersey, etc. ] 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 and so we get to own the rights again! “

This is wrong on so many levels.

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

(As an aside, there are entire countries that have what we view as insanity in their laws about what you take a picture of — like the countries that say you can’t take any pictures of a photos of their architecture or of their land. In other words, when you look out on that Tuscan landscape, you don’t own what you see if it’s in a tangible form, as we understand it.

We say: Are you kidding me?

We are now boycotting Italy for the reason that they want to own what we see with our eyes. )

***

A message to Boards of Directors, legislative authorities, foundations, Regents and whoever else seeks to keep public domain images away from the public:

Are you crazy?

Do you not have business experience because you’re so busy giving fundraisers and getting free money?

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. [As an aside, every time we find the rare book reading room at a library it's for faculty, grad students or someone else with credentials - not us. We're now considering going guerilla art-digitizing. It's not that difficult to find someone to let us in, and they're usually a barrista in the area who is an art history grad student. ]

First, Vintage Printable is doing you a favor by indexing these images. If the public sees these images there’s way more public awareness. Would you rather pay for that? OK, then pay me.

Second, why in the world would you want to charge for the images and pay the lawyers to go around sending nastygrams? Why not let everyone use the images or even pay people to use them - 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.

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. . .

**********

Be that as it may . . . this site is licensed with a creative commons non-commercial attribution license.

Although of course we don’t claim any rights in the individual works – public domain works can be copied freely. But, please understand that you do not have permission to wholesale copy major portions of my site, including collections of organized works. We’re mostly talking about site scrapers and the like. We want to remain recognizable in our organization, our overall selection of images, and the way we use that little Tapir in our logo.

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.