[open-archaeology] CyArk, Open Access and Creative Commons licenses

Tue Oct 29 16:02:50 UTC 2013

Dear all,
I think this will be old news for some of you, but I wanted to point out
this conversation that I had on Twitter

https://twitter.com/stekosteko/status/394459313197948929

based on this "horror story" from Martin Hurley

http://rapidlasso.com/2013/04/14/can-you-copyright-lidar/

Now, as I noted in the short 140 characters of one tweet linked above, I
don't think CyArk has a moral or legal obligation to provide truly open
access to the data they create (on behalf of other institutions and
organisations). In many countries, Italy among them, such scanning
campaigns would get through only with severe limitations (as well seen
in the case of the David of Michelangelo scanned years ago by Stanford
University).

What I find unacceptable is that they clearly recognise that there is
value and visibility in Open Access, so they just put a label on their
webpages because after all no one will notice. By their definition of
OA, pretty much all the WWW is Open Access! CyArk hit the news just days
ago with their 500 project and it would be really bad for the public and
the cultural heritage sector (that CyArk champions, from some points of
view) if a "look, but don't touch" approach was taken as the way to go
for open access to such data.

We could digress on the difference between open access and Open Access,
but I don't find it particularly interesting. It would be more
interesting to look into the motivations that institutions collaborating
with CyArk (museums, governments, ...) find to lock down access to
high-res reusable data.

Thoughts welcome!
Ciao,
steko

-- 
Stefano Costa
http://steko.iosa.it/