Tag: web

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.