Tag: law
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Linkpost: Botticelli v Warhol – 2025 Cultural Heritage Conference in Florence
IP Kat (which is very much the blog to follow on legal news regarding so called intellectual property) published a 2 part guest post summarizing this conference in Florence:
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Linkpost: 10 years of pomological watercolors
10 years ago, Parker Higgins called for the publishing of a collection of pomological watercolors, click through for the details (but this is pretty famous in my corner of the internet): https://parkerhiggins.net/2025/04/10-years-of-pomological-watercolors
What struck me while reading the 10-year-anniversary post was this quote:
Through a handful of FOIA requests I’d learned that the images had been meticulously digitized and put online for purchase, but that less than 100 pictures had been sold that way — not nearly enough to justify the paywall.
We previously wrote about the ongoing attempts at selling access to cultural heritage digitalisations that have long entered the public domain, as long as they’re owned by museums.
The fundamental issue is that while it might be nice to generate revenue both for the institutions conserving the artifacts, and for the people doing the digitalisation (that’s us, ideally), there is simply not enough willingness to pay.
There is also the moral question of creating a class of works which never truly join the public domain, but I’ve found it quite hard to argue with people about this, apparently the public domain is not a self-evident good thing for everyone.
And of course there’s the latest hype, AI, which allows people both to attempt to profit from the public domain (by using it to train their models) and to trivially bypass paywalls (by just generating another image). This complicates the argument for the public domain, at least for those whose benefits are not self-evident.
Yet, those benefits are there, and they are great.
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New Creative Commons initiative for Cultural Heritage
Creative Commons just launched the new TAROCH initiative, which is closely aligned with our goals. Go read the founding declaration: https://creativecommons.org/2024/11/01/creative-commons-launches-taroch-coalition-for-open-access-to-cultural-heritage/
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Unsurprising legal case on commercial use of cultural heritage
This case https://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2024/10/bologna-court-of-appeal-confirms-that.html is consistent with the Italian legislation. We hold that no image right should hold in perpetuity, and we really don’t understand which principle the Italian legislation is upholding.
The simplest interpretation is that they think that they will create profits for cultural heritage institutions, which certainly could use funding. It doesn’t seem to produce this effect in reality, though.
If they keep successfully suing commercial users, we think that the most likely outcome will be a diminished presence of Italian culture in commercial settings, and, in the long term, a loss of mind share. After all, there’s plenty of unencumbered art that is just as good.
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Go read: “Secret 3D Scans in the French Supreme Court”
We’ve just read this post by the brilliant Cosmo Wenman of Concept Realizations.
The cause is near and dear to us, doubly so because it involves Rodin’s The Thinker, which we have remixed for the BCC Innovation Festival.
What we genuinely cannot understand is how people opposing the free distribution of our cultural heritage think of these issues. It is disconcerting, and we know that being unable to summarize the opposition’s views often signals a lack of genuine understanding.
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Link post: Digital Dark Age
Just sharing this MIT Technology Review article on digital archives, a cause that’s close to our hearts: https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/08/19/1096284/data-archives-archeologists-tiktok-future-wayback-machine/?src=longreads
It is always a good occasion to mention: donate to the Internet Archive, it is such an important resource, and it’s constantly under attack. Donating to them was the first thing I did when I got my first wage (rapidly followed by Wikipedia).
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The Open Access saga goes on
Read the latest developments on the rules regarding Open Access and cultural heritage in the Italian legislative system: https://www.wikimedia.it/news/il-cammino-verso-lopen-access-in-italia/
Our own position is that eventually openness will win out, simply because the state is trying to charge for something that people are not willing to pay for, and the state has very little enforcement power over the open web (they should have even less).
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XR News for 2024-04-23
People expected big changes after the release of the Apple Vision Pro, and some are visibly disappointed. Apple tends to have a big effect on the mainstream, lots of people seem to think that they invented the smartphone, when the iPhone came out I was using my third smartphone.
XR technology has been commercially available for 30 years, it tends to progress in the same way that people go bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly.
We’re seeing some pretty interesting gradual changes, particularly in terms of software platforms. The Apple partnership seems to really have pushed Unity into high gear, they’re releasing a lot of resources, both on the editor side and on the design side. Sadly some of the best stuff is reserved for paying customers, and it’s pretty expensive.
This seems to also have changed the thinking on the Sony (with the opening up of PSVR2 to PC users) and Meta. In just a few days Meta announced a radical opening up of their efforts.
First of all they announced a new educational project, which will probably increase the demand for the kind of work we do quite a bit. The fundamental problem is that they keep using the “metaverse” word, and quite a few people have a very negative reaction to it. The concept is really not that clear, but the educational uses of VR are real, hopefully if there is an educational sales push it will also benefit us.
The most important announcement is the opening up of their operating system. It will be possible to buy compatible headsets from other manufacturers, which should keep prices affordable without selling hardware at a loss, and even more importantly they’re opening up the app store. Multiple stores will be available, which could several important advantages. We could have a cross-platform cultural heritage app store which encourages reuse. Or more prosaically, maybe I could use some of my SteamVR purchases.
Zuckerberg is explicitly aiming at providing the Windows of the XR market. At the same time, these changes should make them entirely Digital Markets Act compliant.