[OpenGLAM] Wellcome

Tue Jan 21 12:47:52 UTC 2014

Hi all, 
i actually think that this is a somewhat problematic announcement. The images released by the welcome library are actually all out of copyright and should be labelled as such. You can’t apply a CC license to something that is not protected by copyright or similar rights since the license requires the presence of such rights in order to be effective. 

Does anybody know if the welcome library claims that there are such rights in these works (for example in the reproductions) or if they have misunderstood how the licenses work? It would be great if we could find a way of working with them to fix this since in all other aspects this is a beautiful example of how public domain collections can be made available to the public. 
best, paul 

On 21 Jan 2014, at 13:03, Joris Pekel <jpekel at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear all, 
> 
> For those of you not on Twitter, yesterday the Wellcome Library announced yesterday that they have made over 100,000 high resolution images of manuscripts, paintings, etchings, early photography, and advertisements available using a CC-BY license.
> 
> http://blog.wellcomelibrary.org/2014/01/thousands-of-years-of-visual-culture-made-free-through-wellcome-images/
> 
> The images are of really high quality and many great treasures in general to be found. See for some highlights the selection made by the Public Domain Review. The article says: 
> 
> "This move by the Wellcome is yet another recent example of a hugely respected institution releasing digitisations of its public domain content under an open license – with the last 6 months seeing The Getty and The British Library making similar moves. It’s a really promising sign of a more general shift toward opening up public domain content that we’ve seen taking place in the cultural sector over the last couple of years. Wonderful stuff!"
> 
> http://publicdomainreview.org/2014/01/20/selection-from-wellcome-librarys-release-of-100k-openly-licensed-images/
> 
> Enjoy!
> 
> Joris
> _______________________________________________
> open-glam mailing list
> open-glam at lists.okfn.org
> https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-glam
> Unsubscribe: https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/open-glam