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

Tue Oct 29 17:31:02 UTC 2013

I haven't followed CyArk too closely, except for that "take down" case. But
I agree CyArk's behavior is cause for concern. Ut really does look like
CyArk is engaging in "Open Washing", trying to appear open but making very
strong claims of exclusive ownership of data. It's even more worrisome
because of the justifications / claims made about preserving cultural
heritage via their scanning efforts.

In effect, they are attempting to claim exclusive ownership of the
preservation record of many high-profile sites. I think there are some
ethical issues in such claims, and I think this sort of thing makes it more
difficult to engage in good data curation / preservation practices. Ideally
the datasets should be widely copied and replicated ("Lots of Copies Keeps
Stuff Safe").

Best!
-E

On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 9:32 AM, Anthony Beck <A.R.Beck at leeds.ac.uk> wrote:

>  This debacle is already being considered by some in a commissioning and
> curatorial position. From those I have spoken to I tend to see the desire
> to be fully open under standard licences. The position adopted by CyArk is
> disingenous and may become a problematic position in the medium/long term
> as issues of trust/provenance/credibility surrounding re-use are better
> understood.
>
> best
>
> A
>
> On 29/10/13 16:02, Stefano Costa wrote:
>
> 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/
>
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> --
>
> Anthony Beck
> OrcID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2991-811X
> Research Fellow
> DART Project
> School of Computing
> University of Leeds
>
> Follow me on Twitter: AntArch
> Follow DART on Twitter: DART_Project
>
> The DART project website is continually updated www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/dart
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