National Portrait Gallery: Nuts

This is so wrong:

Below is a letter I received from legal representatives of the National Portrait Gallery, London, on Friday, July 10, regarding images of public domain paintings in Category:National Portrait Gallery, London and threatening direct legal action under UK law. The letter is reproduced here to enable public discourse on the issue. For a list of sites discussing this event see User:Dcoetzee/NPG legal threat/Coverage. I am consulting legal representation and have not yet taken action.

Look, NPG, your job is to get people to look at your pix. Here's some news: unless they're in London, they can't do that. Put those pix online, and (a) that get to see the pix and (b) when they're in London, they're more likely to come and visit, no?

So you should be *encouraging* people to upload your pix to places like Wikipedia; you should be thanking them. The fact that you are threatening them with legal action shows that you don't have even an inkling of what you are employed to do.

Remind me not to pay the part of my UK taxes that goes towards your salary....

The Real Reason to Celebrate GNU's Birthday

As you may have noticed, there's a bit of a virtual shindig going on in celebration of GNU's 25th birthday (including Stephen Fry's wonderfully British salute, which really, er, takes the cake....). Most of these encomiums have dutifully noted how all the free and open source software we take for granted today – GNU/Linux, Firefox, OpenOffice.org and the rest – would simply not exist had Richard Stallman not drawn his line in the digital sand. But I think all of these paeans rather miss the point....

On Open Enterprise blog.

YouTube: A Video Commons?

I've noticed increasingly that the "young people" seem to watch YouTube rather than that old-fashioned thing called "TV". Here's a nice piece in the Guardian reminding us that YouTube is much more than a super MTV (what's that?), but is fast turning into a kind of visual Wikipedia: if somebody was able to digitise it, you can probably find it.

YouTube is best known for its offbeat videos that become viral sensations. But among its millions of clips is a treasure trove of rare and fascinating arts footage, lovingly posted by fans.

Being able to regard YouTube as a video commons: just one more reason to get rid of 18th-century copyright laws.