I feel we have an obligation to re-use. The best way to keep things from humanity’s pool of cultural artefacts and knowledge available is by re-using and remixing them.
Most of my work is in ensuring more material becomes available for everyone to use. Such as open government data to enable socio-economic impact, with my company, or to allow for more democratic control in my role as chairman of the Open State Foundation. Such as creative output, in the form of images, text and music, in my role as board member of Open Nederland, the member organisation of the Dutch Creative Commons Chapter.
There already is a plethora of material available under open licenses. And while my work is all about adding to that pile and encouraging others to make good use of that, I find that personally I could be more active to re-use the cornucopia of human cultural expression and knowledge that is out there. In this blog I often re-use Creative Commons licensed images from others, and started adding images to my weekly reviews with that specific intent. But I could be much more aware of the opportunities re-usable cultural artefacts allow.
Last May, Elmine’s birthday gift to me was a set of 5 A3 sized photo frames, to fill up the mostly empty white walls of my home office. For months I didn’t get to actually selecting images to put in those frames. Browsed through the 25k of images I have on Flickr myself but couldn’t choose. Then I started playing with some existing images in the public domain or released with an open license, developed some ideas, but still couldn’t choose. Elmine broke the deadlock last week when she suggested to treat them as temporary objects. It isn’t about choosing the perfect images for my walls, it’s about choosing a few good-enough ones that speak to me at this moment in time. Our A3 printer will patiently spit out new images if I so choose.
So yesterday I decided on 5 images. Today Elmine helped me prepare the images for printing, as she has all the right software tools for it, and I don’t. And now they’re on the wall, joining two images already there.
Here are the images and their background as open cultural artefacts.
The eastern wall presents three images. The leftmost one was already there, a photo of me drinking coffee in Lucca, Tuscany in the summer of 2015. A month of healing with the two of us in a year of personal losses. Elmine took this picture and she publishes most of her pictures with a Creative Commons license that allows non-commercial re-use. In general Flickr is a resource to find great images with an open license.
In the middle is the most famous footprint not on this earth. It’s the imprint of Buzz Aldrin’s boot on the moon surface, taken during Apollo 11 in July 1969. NASA has published and is publishing a wide range of images of all their missions, all freely re-usable. This includes the set of Apollo 11 images, with this footprint. I selected this because it shows how even the most amazing human endeavour ultimately is a sequence of single steps.
On the right is a remix of two images. The first image shows our city’s water-gate, Koppelpoort (1425) around 1640. The image is an illustration made by A. Rademaker for a book dated 1727-1733. The Amsterdam Rijksmuseum is putting tremendous effort in digitising all the artefacts in their collection at high resolution and making those images available for free re-use. They also organise design competitions to stimulate people to come up with novel forms of re-use of the art works in their collection. As an overlay I added the iconic primary colored planes of a Mondriaan painting. Piet Mondriaan was born in our city, where his childhood home is now a museum of his work. As Mondriaan died in 1944, his work entered the public domain in 2015 and is freely re-usable. The image thus combines the medieval and modern history of Amersfoort.
Those primary colors are continued in the images on the southern wall of my office, the one my desk is facing.
On the left is an adapted page of Lego’s US patent. Patents are public documents (you get commercial protection for your invention in exchange for publishing how it works and thus adding to the world’s pool of knowledge). Patent offices publish patents and Google makes them searchable. So you can search for your favourite invention, whether it’s a Lego brick, a moonlander, a pepper grinder or Apple’s original iPod interface, and take a page from the patent to hang on your wall. Elmine added primary colors to the bricks in the patent illustration on my request.
In the middle is the photo I took last week visiting the Groninger Museum, with both E and Y in front of a giant head in primary colors, in the Alessandro Mendini exhibit. The image is available under a Creative Commons license (for non-commercial and equally shared re-use).
The rightmost photo was already there, a beautiful gift from Cees Elzenga, a photographer and photo journalist, who was our neighbour in Enschede. It is a photo in the rain, at night, near Brandenburger Tor in Berlin, and it strongly evokes the gloom I encountered visiting the still divided city in the second half of the ’80s. This is the one image on the wall that is not openly licensed.
One image is still missing, as I loaned one of the photo frames Elmine gave me to Y temporarily, until her own pin-board arrives in a few days. She uses it for two photos her grandmother sent her, after visiting the Unseen photo exhibit in Amsterdam with her. When it returns I will use the final frame for another NASA image, that of an ‘earth rise’ on the moon, similar to what I use as a background image on my Mastodon (and Twitter) profile page.
As my friend Peter says, we have an obligation to explain. So others may follow in our footsteps of tinkering and creating.
I feel we also have an obligation to re-use. The best way to keep things from humanity’s pool of cultural artefacts and knowledge available is by re-using and remixing them. What gets used keeps meaning and value, will not be forgotten. My office walls now make a tiny contribution to that.
I think this is really true – the perfect is the enemy of the good, as they say. I think knowing something can be ephemeral, or improved upon, removes the friction of acting. I’m finding this with writing in my blog/wiki.
I’m also enjoying this as a way of stimulating thoughts and writing too – by quoting and reusing parts of other people’s posts as a jumping off point.
Last year I added openly licensed images of the week number to my Week Notes postings. I want to more frequently use openly licensed and re-usable cultural artefacts. Because ultimately, only if you use it will it stay available, so there’s an obligation to re-use common cultural artefacts. All images I use here on my blog, and also all images I use in presentations are Creative Commons licensed or Public Domain images (except for screenshots). My own photos are Creative Commons licensed (though not fully open, as they preclude commercial re-use), as are my postings here.
For 2020 I came up with a new rationale for the expected 53 weekly images, using an idea that Elmine suggested to me.
In 2020 I will choose re-usable images based on historical events of the week in question. So every Week Notes of 2020 will end with a ‘This week in … ‘ segment with an openly licensed image.
Here’s to 2020!
(Left hand side image by Andy Maguire, license CC BY. Right hand side image by John Johnston, license CC BY SA)
I much like Laura Kalbag’s “I don’t track you” declaration on her blog. She links to that post in the footer of her webpages.
As Laura Kalbag says it’s “as much a fact as a mission statement“. I would definitely like to be able to say the same, because it’s important as a signal, as a statement that the web does not need to be what the silos as advert delivery and manipulation vehicles make it to be. But for this blog it isn’t fully a fact.
I do not track anything anyone does on my site. But others in some instances do. This is the case where I embed material from elsewhere. Although often what I embed is still my own content, such as photos and slides, they are served from the likes of YouTube (Google), Flickr, and Slideshare (LinkedIn). The primary reason for using such services is storage space. Presentations, videos and photo collections tend to be large files, filling up the allocated space in my hosting package quickly. And of course there are occasions where I do want to show content by others (photos and videos). Especially in the case of images, showing other people’s content here is very deliberate, based on an obligation to re-use.
This means that I am an enabler of the tracking that such services do when you visit my blog. To be certain, you have a personal responsibility here too: your browser is your castle, and that Castle Doctrine of browsers means that you should already actively block tracking in your browser. However, I also have a responsibility to not expose visitors to tracking where that can be avoided.
So how to avoid tracking? What alternatives are out there? Here’s a list with the services from which this site over the years has embedded material.
YouTube (Google): I did not know this until I looked for it today, prompted by Laura Kalbag’s blogpost, but Google provides a setting with embedded YT videos that disables tracking and serves the video from a different domain (youtube-nocookies.com). This is what I will do from now on, and I will go through my older postings to change the embed code in the same way.
Flickr: I use Flickr a lot, it’s both my off-site online photo backup, as well as an easy way to post images here, without taking up hosting space. My tracking detection tool (Ghostery) does not find any trackers of embedded images, provided I strip out some of the scripting that comes with an embed by default. This stripping of superfluous stuff I routinely do, and is in my muscle memory.
Slideshare: this I think needs replacing. A Slideshare embed always comes with a Google Analytics tracker and a 3rd party beacon it seems. There is no way I can strip any of that out. It’s a good idea to do without Slideshare anyway, so need to search for an alternative. I might go for my own cloud space, or start making my slides differently, e.g. in HTML5, or find some other tool that I can attach to a private cloud space, and allows easy sharing with others.[UPDATE Oct/Nov 2020: I deleted my Slideshare account and am bringing those presentations to a hosting package and domain I control]
Scribd: this one definitely needs to go too. Embedding a Scribd document adds Google Analytics and a Facebook tracker, and curiously still a Google+ tracker too, though that service no longer exists. Again, need to search for an alternative. Same as with Slideshare. [UPDATE Oct/Nov 2020: I deleted my company’s Scribd account, and am in the process of bringing those documents to a self-hosted environment]
Vimeo: this video embedding service does not add trackers as far as I can tell from my Ghostery tracking monitoring plugin.
23Video: this platform has pivoted to corporate marketing videos and webinars, and no longer supports casual embeds like in the past. I will need to go through my archive though to clean up the postings where I used 23Video.
Qik. This was a live streaming video service I used around 2008. The domain is no longer active, and any embeds no longer work. Will need to clean up some old postings.
So, from this list, Slideshare and Scribd stand out as the ones adding tracking features to this site, and will need to go first. So I’ll focus there on finding replacements. Flickr and Vimeo are ok for now, and Youtube for as long as they respect their own privacy settings. Flickr and Vimeo of course don’t have your data as their business model, whereas YT does, and it shows. Once I’ve removed the tracking functionality from embedded content, what remains is that any call to an outside source results in your IP being logged in that outside server’s logs, and by extension your user agent etc. This is unavoidable as it comes with connecting to any web server. The only way I can avoid such logging is by ensuring I no longer use anything from any outside source, and hosting it myself. For my own content that is possible, as for images I re-use from e.g. Flickr (by serving the image itself from a server I own, and otherwise just linking to the source and creator. As I did with the image below), but hardest for re-using other people’s videos.
Tracks of footprints in the snow, image by Roland Tanglao, license CC BY
The Britsh Museum is chock full of fascinating artefacts, even if the sourcing of some of those artefacts means their ownership of them is disputed. While that sourcing happened in different times perhaps (which doesn’t mean our current perspective can’t be different), in these times echoes of that can be heard in the form of digital appropriation.
Earlier this week the British Museum announced they had revamped their website. Part of the revamp is providing more and better digital images of artefacts. Digitising artefacts well is a lot of work and effort, and making them available to the public is very laudable. Especially as the British Museum says, since we’re now only capable of visiting from home.
Director Hartwig Fischer in the museum’s communication is quoted saying
Inspiration, cool. Let’s do. Jason Kottke wrote about it and posted some beautiful images.
I went to the BM’s site as well and browsed. Then I came across this artefact:
Screenshot of the British Museum showing a 1725 etching, with copyright claim
I didn’t know the British Museum had a print of the water gates in my hometown!
Then I noticed an oddity: a ‘(c) Trustees of the British Museum’ statement on it. I have the image (remixed with a Mondriaan painting, by E after my idea) on my wall. This as the etching by A. Rademaker is also in the collection of the Rijksmuseum, and they too have digitised their collection and made it available. At the Rijksmuseum that image however is public domain.
The British Museum also allows downloading images. For ‘my’ image at least that download is of distinctly lower resolution than the Rijksmuseum download (the BM’s download is 365Kb, the Rijks’ 2.8MB). Here you see them side by side, BM on the left, Rijks on the right.
‘high-ish’ res BM image on the left, higher res Rijks image on the right
Moving on from inspiration to reflection then, as per the director’s words: What’s up with that copyright claim? The etching itself, being from the 18th century, is clearly in the public domain. Are they saying making a photo of an artefact is creating a new copyright? As Cory Doctorow also noted, that is a wild claim to make. Making a photo of an artefact to show just that artefact is not considered a creative act, and thus not protected under copyright rules, in the UK (PDF) and the EU.
The actual licensing terms attached by the British Museum to a downloaded image are Creative Commons BY NC SA, meaning only non-commercial use is allowed, if the results are shared under the same conditions and the British Museum is mentioned as the source. This is not an open license. It means that Jason Kottke who, inspired as hoped by the BM’s director, put images on his site is in breach of this license, as he also sollicits membership payments through his blog. Appropriate would be a CC0 license, or public domain mark. Claiming copyright on an image that actually is in the public domain because its subject matter is in the public domain on the other hand is digital appropriation.
A second question is why would the British Museum do this? A clue is the information shown when you want to download an image:
BM allows download for non-commercial use, but for commercial use requires a request
The distinction between commercial and non-commercial forms of use, I suspect, may have something to do with the effort of digitisation. Digitisation is generally very costly. Museums fall under the EU PSI Directive on the re-use of public information. In that Directive a possibility exists to temporarily make the exploitation of digitised material exclusive to a certain party as reward for help with the digitisation. Under this exemption tech companies can enter into agreements with museums and libraries to digitise their collections and have a handful of years before the results become generally available to the public. The fact that the BM publishes some images for the general public, at lower quality, is another potential clue. It’s my speculation, but it may mean that the BM tries to provide at least some publicly available material, while the exclusive exploitation rights for whoever is paying for the digitisation still exist. In other countries we’ve seen that material isn’t published until those rights expire, and it would indeed be a useful step to find a way of providing at least some access.
However, none of that has any relation to copyright, as the digitisation itself does not create new rights to license. It would I think better be solved by providing lower quality material as public domain material, while higher quality material is made available as part of the exclusive exploitation deal. If this is what is happening, again it’s just my assumption, using a restrictive CC license is the wrong instrument. If it has nothing to do with the digitisation process and surrounding contracts, but only to create revenue for the museum, then using Creative Commons licenses to do so is just plain wrong and digital appropriation that should be corrected.