18 ms·

Important note: CC BY-NC-SA is a non-free license since it discriminates against fields of endeavour. https://www.britishmuseum.org/terms-use/copyright-and-per

Important note: CC BY-NC-SA is a non-free license since it discriminates against fields of endeavour. https://www.britishmuseum.org/terms-use/copyright-and-permissions https://www.britishmuseum.org/terms-use/copyright-and-permis...

smichel17 7y ago
...which makes it really a shame when people use it, since it fragments the commons -- you can't combine it with CC-BY-SA content. For anyone considering, please just use by-sa. The share-alike requirement is probably enough to discourage the exploitative type of commercial use you probably want to avoid.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  I think CC-BY-NC-SA is quite good: basically the NC means that if you want to make money from this content then you should share with the creators, or at least ask for extra permission, that's reasonable IMO. You can still share my content, just not make money by sharing it (unless you ask). Is that really bad?
  - riazrizvi 7y ago
    Yes. British people have already paid the lion's share of what is cost to produce these images, ie getting the artifacts cleaned and into a place where they can be easily photographed. We should be able to use it to generate revenue, since this is further taxed anyway. Seems like a wasted opportunity. Ironically many works of the British Library are out of copyright abroad, but remain in copyright within the UK.
  - Teever 7y ago
    That's a good question. Another good question is "Should the nation of Greece and the Greek people be allowed to profit off of pictures that the British Museum has taken of objects that are only in the British Museum because they were pillaged by British soldiers?" It seems really bad that a nation can invade many other nations and pillage their cultural pieces to squirrel them away in a museum and then dictate to the citizens of those nations what they can or can't do with pictures of the artifacts. The notion that the British Museum can tell Egyptian citizen what they can or can't do with photographs of the Rosetta Stone is pretty odious.
    - new2628 7y ago
      I agree with the sentiment, but at a more abstract level it is almost as shaky that an Egyptian citizen today is entitled to art from the pharaonic times more than a British citizen today.
      - kingkawn 7y ago
        Nothing shaky about it since the Egyptian citizens would be the ones who would have those artworks today had the brits not come round to express their ancient tradition of thieving
        renewiltord 7y ago
        It's the classic problem. I think when I am much older I will commit a lot of crime to benefit my great grandchildren. Time will ease their culpability and they can use arguments like the above.
        eru 7y ago
        Right of conquest is often how kings get a kingdom or expand it.
        rbg246 7y ago
        And was criminalised after world war 2, so its proceeds from a historical crime.
        desas 7y ago
        By that standard so is the whole of America. There's a line to draw somewhere.
        kingkawn 6y ago
        How convenient for America
  - m4rtink 7y ago
    The problem with any Non Commercial licenses is where you draw the line. Say you want to mirror these images, can you show ads on the site to cover hosting costs ? What about asking for donations ? What if you want to print them and distribute to schools - can you get reimbursed for the paper ink and distribution costs ? It gets murky pretty fast, often preventing people from even using such media as they fear possible issues down the line due to uncertainty. At the same time, any bootleggers won't care. Due to this NC clauses are generally not recommended and are for example not part of any OCI accepted open source licenses.
    - gerdesj 7y ago
      "What if you want to print them and distribute to schools - can you get reimbursed for the paper ink and distribution costs" That does not fit my mental definition of "commercial", which I would define as for profit. I'm sure there are corner cases but I don't think that is one of them. Running ads whilst mirroring them - that might be hard to justify unless the revenue was only enough to support the website. Then you should wonder why mirror them at all? Now what about using them in a novel way which is ad supported? Probably OK, provided its at cost and you attribute the source.
      - judge2020 7y ago
        Commercial usage includes any exchange of money, even if you're taking a huge financial loss by using the images, so this license prohibits all of that.
        ElFitz 7y ago
        Really depends. Don't know about other countries, but French private pilotes (PPL) aren't allowed to fly commercially. Yet, they can and often do split the cost of the flight (fuel) with their passengers, and that is considered to be within the law. Even though there is an exchange of money ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
        eru 7y ago
        'For profit' status isn't about actually making a profit, but about specific commercial arrangements. A money losing company doesn't suddenly become a 'non-profit'. But no clue whether the license care about this?
  - dingaling 7y ago
    > Is that really bad? Yes, it's quite mean-spirited. Basically others are free to use the thing that the licenser made unless they're savvy enough to think of a way to make money from it, in which case the licenser gets pissy and says "nope". For no reason other than "I didn't think of that".
    - paranoidrobot 7y ago
      > in which case the licenser gets pissy and says "nope". For no reason other than "I didn't think of that". This is certainly not the intent that I had when choosing that license for the photos I published. I saw what Virgin Mobile Australia did[1][2] by pulling CC-BY attributed photos from Flickr and that cemented my position on not wanting my photos to be used in advertising. [1] https://flickr.com/photos/sesh00/515961023/ https://flickr.com/photos/sesh00/515961023/ [2] https://www.smh.com.au/technology/virgin-sued-for-using-teens-photo-20070921-gdr5wg.html https://www.smh.com.au/technology/virgin-sued-for-using-teen...
    - jshevek 7y ago
      >For no reason other than "I didn't think of that". Of course there are other possible reasons. Many people have a range of relevant ideological positions on the profit motive, and when and where it should be applied.
  - smichel17 6y ago
    Here's a blog post from a friend of mine that explains my viewpoint pretty well. Skip to "Issues with Creative Commons licensing" (or read the whole thing, it's not that long): https://blog.wolftune.com/2011/07/brain-parts-song-video.html https://blog.wolftune.com/2011/07/brain-parts-song-video.htm... edit: I'll add on (my opinion, not from the post) that commercial use that actually respects the share-alike requirement is actually a good thing. Say I take a photo and share it cc-by-sa, then a company adapts edits it to use on their website and releases the edited version cc-by-sa (as they are required to). Now anybody else can use their edited version, too. In effect, we've taken commercial dollars and put them towards adding to the commons. I think that's a great outcome, in a world where currently most FLO[1] works are extremely underfunded. The type of commercial use that I'm opposed to is where a company takes something I (or others) make, embeds it into their proprietary product, and contributes nothing back to the FLO ecosystem (money or time). That's exploitative. But the share-alike requirement already prevents this, without creating incompatibility among otherwise FLO licenses. [1]: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/free-libre-open#flo https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/free-libre-open#flo
- pwdisswordfish2 7y ago
  just use cc0, for god’s sake.
bhickey 7y ago
Except those that are reproductions of 2d public domain works... which means they aren't subject to copyright in the United States.
- pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  When you access a copy in the UK for the purposes of duplication, isn't that infringement in the UK?
  - bhickey 7y ago
    I'm accessing the images under the terms of the license offered. It isn't my problem that they don't enjoy copyright protection in my country of residence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Portrait_Gallery_and_Wikimedia_Foundation_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Portrait_Gallery_and_...
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  British Museum ... in the United States
  - msla 7y ago
    > British Museum ... in the United States Hey, think about export and re-import: I use an image which is PD in the US to make a new work, whch gets reimported into the UK... where the image I used is not PD. What happens? It has to have come up.
    - incompatible 7y ago
      The copyright holder can sue you in the UK, if they feel like it.
klintcho 7y ago
Yes I guess this is a controversial opinion: I do not consider anything that has the NC truly free. Pretty much all "free" datasets are NC-licensed, but they still throw around the word free. GPL is in a similar vein. In the AV industry, there are a bunch of big datasets, all NC. At least now we have the Udacity sets and Audi recently released a really big dataset which was a proper CC BY-SA, Finally! This is something I with good conscious would be able to label free IMHO.
- dublinben 7y ago
  The GPL explicitly does not prevent commercial purposes or outright sale of covered works. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html
- the_af 7y ago
  > GPL is in a similar vein The GPL is not-not-commercial, or in plainer terms, it's commercial.
  - dplavery92 7y ago
    I think that's a fair argument to make for GPL when you're talking about software, e.g. GIMP, which you could use to produce commercial art assets that you then sell. But for data, whether these images or audio clips or weather measurements or whatever, the requirement that derivative products also be licensed under GPL makes their use effectively non-commercial.
    - kiba 7y ago
      You can still sell them. I don't get how it makes them 'non-commercial'?
      - fegu 7y ago
        In many cases this had the effect that you can sell them only once since the buyer then has everything he needs to sell it, and will presumably do so for less.
sp332 7y ago
From one of the image descriptions: To license images for charged-for journals and publications, and other commercial uses, please contact British Museum Images. https://www.britishmuseum.org/terms-use/copyright-and-permissions https://www.britishmuseum.org/terms-use/copyright-and-permis... links to permissions@bmimages.com and sales@bmimages.com
Zenst 7y ago
Interesting as one area they class as `allowed` would be "One-off classroom use" Which seems odd, as that would mean you can only use a single image once in a classroom to educate students and never ever use that image again for as long as you teach to any other class of students. That can't be right, is there a one-off definition in education that I'm unaware of?
- j0ba 7y ago
  I'd interpret it as being free to use for individual teachers, but if the school integrates it into their standard curriculum, then they've gotta pay.
  - Zenst 7y ago
    I'm sure you're right. Which is kinda the crux, limiting an understanding of history thru taxation, whilst something small, it would soon with other information taxation costs end up creating a educational divide even wider than we have today. I also feel that if they allowed and encouraged educational establishments to use them for free. They would create more potential customers who in their lifetime, would go a see them at the museum. So for a Museum, it would tick the PR, tourism, and visitors count boxes nicely. With that, I'm going to email them, though will craft the idea out more, any input welcome.
renewiltord 7y ago
I'll release them on The Pirate Bay as CC-BY-SA. Don't worry.
akudha 7y ago
If someone has a blog on tourism in Britain and has Adsense on the blog, does this mean he can't use these images even on pages that don't have Adsense?
- kragen 7y ago
  Unfortunately, CC-NC does allow that kind of thing, even though to my eyes it's clearly commercial.

smichel17 7y ago

...which makes it really a shame when people use it, since it fragments the commons -- you can't combine it with CC-BY-SA content. For anyone considering, please just use by-sa. The share-alike requirement is probably enough to discourage the exploitative type of commercial use you probably want to avoid.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
I think CC-BY-NC-SA is quite good: basically the NC means that if you want to make money from this content then you should share with the creators, or at least ask for extra permission, that's reasonable IMO. You can still share my content, just not make money by sharing it (unless you ask). Is that really bad?
- riazrizvi 7y ago
  Yes. British people have already paid the lion's share of what is cost to produce these images, ie getting the artifacts cleaned and into a place where they can be easily photographed. We should be able to use it to generate revenue, since this is further taxed anyway. Seems like a wasted opportunity. Ironically many works of the British Library are out of copyright abroad, but remain in copyright within the UK.
- Teever 7y ago
  That's a good question. Another good question is "Should the nation of Greece and the Greek people be allowed to profit off of pictures that the British Museum has taken of objects that are only in the British Museum because they were pillaged by British soldiers?" It seems really bad that a nation can invade many other nations and pillage their cultural pieces to squirrel them away in a museum and then dictate to the citizens of those nations what they can or can't do with pictures of the artifacts. The notion that the British Museum can tell Egyptian citizen what they can or can't do with photographs of the Rosetta Stone is pretty odious.
  - new2628 7y ago
    I agree with the sentiment, but at a more abstract level it is almost as shaky that an Egyptian citizen today is entitled to art from the pharaonic times more than a British citizen today.
    - kingkawn 7y ago
      Nothing shaky about it since the Egyptian citizens would be the ones who would have those artworks today had the brits not come round to express their ancient tradition of thieving
      - renewiltord 7y ago
        It's the classic problem. I think when I am much older I will commit a lot of crime to benefit my great grandchildren. Time will ease their culpability and they can use arguments like the above.
        eru 7y ago
        Right of conquest is often how kings get a kingdom or expand it.
        rbg246 7y ago
        And was criminalised after world war 2, so its proceeds from a historical crime.
        desas 7y ago
        By that standard so is the whole of America. There's a line to draw somewhere.
        kingkawn 6y ago
        How convenient for America
- m4rtink 7y ago
  The problem with any Non Commercial licenses is where you draw the line. Say you want to mirror these images, can you show ads on the site to cover hosting costs ? What about asking for donations ? What if you want to print them and distribute to schools - can you get reimbursed for the paper ink and distribution costs ? It gets murky pretty fast, often preventing people from even using such media as they fear possible issues down the line due to uncertainty. At the same time, any bootleggers won't care. Due to this NC clauses are generally not recommended and are for example not part of any OCI accepted open source licenses.
  - gerdesj 7y ago
    "What if you want to print them and distribute to schools - can you get reimbursed for the paper ink and distribution costs" That does not fit my mental definition of "commercial", which I would define as for profit. I'm sure there are corner cases but I don't think that is one of them. Running ads whilst mirroring them - that might be hard to justify unless the revenue was only enough to support the website. Then you should wonder why mirror them at all? Now what about using them in a novel way which is ad supported? Probably OK, provided its at cost and you attribute the source.
    - judge2020 7y ago
      Commercial usage includes any exchange of money, even if you're taking a huge financial loss by using the images, so this license prohibits all of that.
      - ElFitz 7y ago
        Really depends. Don't know about other countries, but French private pilotes (PPL) aren't allowed to fly commercially. Yet, they can and often do split the cost of the flight (fuel) with their passengers, and that is considered to be within the law. Even though there is an exchange of money ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
      - eru 7y ago
        'For profit' status isn't about actually making a profit, but about specific commercial arrangements. A money losing company doesn't suddenly become a 'non-profit'. But no clue whether the license care about this?
- dingaling 7y ago
  > Is that really bad? Yes, it's quite mean-spirited. Basically others are free to use the thing that the licenser made unless they're savvy enough to think of a way to make money from it, in which case the licenser gets pissy and says "nope". For no reason other than "I didn't think of that".
  - paranoidrobot 7y ago
    > in which case the licenser gets pissy and says "nope". For no reason other than "I didn't think of that". This is certainly not the intent that I had when choosing that license for the photos I published. I saw what Virgin Mobile Australia did[1][2] by pulling CC-BY attributed photos from Flickr and that cemented my position on not wanting my photos to be used in advertising. [1] https://flickr.com/photos/sesh00/515961023/ https://flickr.com/photos/sesh00/515961023/ [2] https://www.smh.com.au/technology/virgin-sued-for-using-teens-photo-20070921-gdr5wg.html https://www.smh.com.au/technology/virgin-sued-for-using-teen...
  - jshevek 7y ago
    >For no reason other than "I didn't think of that". Of course there are other possible reasons. Many people have a range of relevant ideological positions on the profit motive, and when and where it should be applied.
- smichel17 6y ago
  Here's a blog post from a friend of mine that explains my viewpoint pretty well. Skip to "Issues with Creative Commons licensing" (or read the whole thing, it's not that long): https://blog.wolftune.com/2011/07/brain-parts-song-video.html https://blog.wolftune.com/2011/07/brain-parts-song-video.htm... edit: I'll add on (my opinion, not from the post) that commercial use that actually respects the share-alike requirement is actually a good thing. Say I take a photo and share it cc-by-sa, then a company adapts edits it to use on their website and releases the edited version cc-by-sa (as they are required to). Now anybody else can use their edited version, too. In effect, we've taken commercial dollars and put them towards adding to the commons. I think that's a great outcome, in a world where currently most FLO[1] works are extremely underfunded. The type of commercial use that I'm opposed to is where a company takes something I (or others) make, embeds it into their proprietary product, and contributes nothing back to the FLO ecosystem (money or time). That's exploitative. But the share-alike requirement already prevents this, without creating incompatibility among otherwise FLO licenses. [1]: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/free-libre-open#flo https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/free-libre-open#flo
pwdisswordfish2 7y ago
just use cc0, for god’s sake.

bhickey 7y ago

Except those that are reproductions of 2d public domain works... which means they aren't subject to copyright in the United States.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
When you access a copy in the UK for the purposes of duplication, isn't that infringement in the UK?
- bhickey 7y ago
  I'm accessing the images under the terms of the license offered. It isn't my problem that they don't enjoy copyright protection in my country of residence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Portrait_Gallery_and_Wikimedia_Foundation_copyright_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Portrait_Gallery_and_...
chrisseaton 7y ago
British Museum ... in the United States
- msla 7y ago
  > British Museum ... in the United States Hey, think about export and re-import: I use an image which is PD in the US to make a new work, whch gets reimported into the UK... where the image I used is not PD. What happens? It has to have come up.
  - incompatible 7y ago
    The copyright holder can sue you in the UK, if they feel like it.

klintcho 7y ago

Yes I guess this is a controversial opinion: I do not consider anything that has the NC truly free. Pretty much all "free" datasets are NC-licensed, but they still throw around the word free. GPL is in a similar vein. In the AV industry, there are a bunch of big datasets, all NC. At least now we have the Udacity sets and Audi recently released a really big dataset which was a proper CC BY-SA, Finally! This is something I with good conscious would be able to label free IMHO.

dublinben 7y ago
The GPL explicitly does not prevent commercial purposes or outright sale of covered works. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html
the_af 7y ago
> GPL is in a similar vein The GPL is not-not-commercial, or in plainer terms, it's commercial.
- dplavery92 7y ago
  I think that's a fair argument to make for GPL when you're talking about software, e.g. GIMP, which you could use to produce commercial art assets that you then sell. But for data, whether these images or audio clips or weather measurements or whatever, the requirement that derivative products also be licensed under GPL makes their use effectively non-commercial.
  - kiba 7y ago
    You can still sell them. I don't get how it makes them 'non-commercial'?
    - fegu 7y ago
      In many cases this had the effect that you can sell them only once since the buyer then has everything he needs to sell it, and will presumably do so for less.

sp332 7y ago

From one of the image descriptions: To license images for charged-for journals and publications, and other commercial uses, please contact British Museum Images. https://www.britishmuseum.org/terms-use/copyright-and-permissions https://www.britishmuseum.org/terms-use/copyright-and-permis... links to permissions@bmimages.com and sales@bmimages.com

Zenst 7y ago

Interesting as one area they class as `allowed` would be "One-off classroom use" Which seems odd, as that would mean you can only use a single image once in a classroom to educate students and never ever use that image again for as long as you teach to any other class of students. That can't be right, is there a one-off definition in education that I'm unaware of?

j0ba 7y ago
I'd interpret it as being free to use for individual teachers, but if the school integrates it into their standard curriculum, then they've gotta pay.
- Zenst 7y ago
  I'm sure you're right. Which is kinda the crux, limiting an understanding of history thru taxation, whilst something small, it would soon with other information taxation costs end up creating a educational divide even wider than we have today. I also feel that if they allowed and encouraged educational establishments to use them for free. They would create more potential customers who in their lifetime, would go a see them at the museum. So for a Museum, it would tick the PR, tourism, and visitors count boxes nicely. With that, I'm going to email them, though will craft the idea out more, any input welcome.

renewiltord 7y ago

I'll release them on The Pirate Bay as CC-BY-SA. Don't worry.

akudha 7y ago

If someone has a blog on tourism in Britain and has Adsense on the blog, does this mean he can't use these images even on pages that don't have Adsense?

kragen 7y ago
Unfortunately, CC-NC does allow that kind of thing, even though to my eyes it's clearly commercial.