A group called Public Resource is protesting the actions of American Smithsonian Institute, which at the site SmithsonianImages.SI.Edu asserts copyright to over 6000 historical photographs, many of which are in the public domain according to the activists.

The group has downloaded low quality scans available for free (high quality versions have to be bought from the Smithsonian) and "freed them" - by uploading to Flickr. There, being unable to tag them as public domain material, they have marked them as CC licensed.

This has caused some critical comments to surface, suggesting that it is foolish or even wrong, as in this manner copyright is again asserted over public domain content. I see parallels between such argument and the broader argument that you cannot build an alternative to the copyright regime by using it and thus further strengthening authors' rights (an argument of this sort is made by Niva Elkin Koren in “Creative Commons: A Skeptical View of a Worthy Pursuit”).

I do not agree with it - I would rather say that this is a creative use of the CC licensing mechanism, which assumes a certain fuzziness of this mechanism. People just make do with what they have at hand - in this case, the photos were afterwards marked as "probably Public Domain" - in the tag field.

As a side note, this once again proves the importance of setting up proper licensing infrastructures by content-hosting sites, as more and more often people will post free content there (Internet Archive, you're a brilliant site, but please let me finally use localized CC licenses!).

Last thing - Public Resource makes another interesting point about Flickr. By uploading the photos that are "possibly Public Domain", they hope that there are enough eyeballs among Flickr users to make this a shallow problem.

tags: United States culture public-domain public-resource flickr fuzzy-licensing

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