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Comment by andrewshadura | Hacker News Reader

Important note: CC BY-NC-SA is a non-free license since it discriminates against fields of endeavour.

https://www.britishmuseum.org/terms-use/copyright-and-permis...

...which makes it really a shame when people use it, since it fragments the commons -- you can't combine it with CC-BY-SA content.

For anyone considering, please just use by-sa. The share-alike requirement is probably enough to discourage the exploitative type of commercial use you probably want to avoid.

I think CC-BY-NC-SA is quite good: basically the NC means that if you want to make money from this content then you should share with the creators, or at least ask for extra permission, that's reasonable IMO. You can still share my content, just not make money by sharing it (unless you ask).

Is that really bad?

Yes. British people have already paid the lion's share of what is cost to produce these images, ie getting the artifacts cleaned and into a place where they can be easily photographed. We should be able to use it to generate revenue, since this is further taxed anyway. Seems like a wasted opportunity.

Ironically many works of the British Library are out of copyright abroad, but remain in copyright within the UK.

That's a good question.

Another good question is "Should the nation of Greece and the Greek people be allowed to profit off of pictures that the British Museum has taken of objects that are only in the British Museum because they were pillaged by British soldiers?"

It seems really bad that a nation can invade many other nations and pillage their cultural pieces to squirrel them away in a museum and then dictate to the citizens of those nations what they can or can't do with pictures of the artifacts.

The notion that the British Museum can tell Egyptian citizen what they can or can't do with photographs of the Rosetta Stone is pretty odious.

I agree with the sentiment, but at a more abstract level it is almost as shaky that an Egyptian citizen today is entitled to art from the pharaonic times more than a British citizen today.

Nothing shaky about it since the Egyptian citizens would be the ones who would have those artworks today had the brits not come round to express their ancient tradition of thieving

It's the classic problem. I think when I am much older I will commit a lot of crime to benefit my great grandchildren. Time will ease their culpability and they can use arguments like the above.

Right of conquest is often how kings get a kingdom or expand it.

And was criminalised after world war 2, so its proceeds from a historical crime.

By that standard so is the whole of America. There's a line to draw somewhere.

How convenient for America

To be a snarky: that was a cartel that benefited from the deed in the past outlawing its competition.

This conclusion assumes many things that are not a given, such as the assumptions that it would have been not have been lost, damaged, or stolen by a third party during all of that time.

Indeed, 'ownership' of ancient things is never so simple.

The stone was carved ~196 BC (Hellenistic period)

Circa 1470 AD the stone was taken (probably from the town of Sais) by slaves of Egyptian/Syrian Sultan Quaitbay for use as raw building material for a military Fort (Fort Jullien aka Fort of Qaitbey)

The French discovered it during Napoleon's Egypt/Syria campeign in 1799 AD

The British defeated the French and took the stone to London under the Capitulation of Alexandria in 1801 AD

> The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of a larger stele. No additional fragments were found in later searches of the Rosetta site. Owing to its damaged state, none of the three texts is absolutely complete. The top register, composed of Egyptian hieroglyphs, suffered the most damage. Only the last 14 lines of the hieroglyphic text can be seen; all of them are broken on the right side, and 12 of them on the left. wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosetta_Stone

So because it is possible someone else may have come along and stolen it, that is a justification for the Brits to steal (and keep) it?

The point is that Britain has those artifacts now and Greece/Egypt/other countries want them back now.

>So because it is possible someone else may have come along and stolen it, that is a justification for the Brits to steal (and keep) it?

Please do not pollute the conversation with strawmen. There are more options here than the two extremes. Take a look at the comment to which I was responding:

>...the Egyptian citizens would be the ones who would have those artworks today had the brits not come round to express their ancient tradition of thieving

And take another look at my actual comment:

>This conclusion assumes many things that are not a given, such as the assumptions that it would have been not have been lost, damaged, or stolen by a third party during all of that time.

The comment to which I was responding presented an absurd and presumptive claim. Absurd claims should be called out for what they are, regardless of which 'side' you perceive to be strengthened or weakened by doing so.

It was only stolen 100-200 years ago. It had survived for 2000-4000 years... I'm not sure your argument holds weight.

If you read the link to the article about the Elgin marbles I posted in response to the original Brit-bashing comment that launched this thread, you'll see it does; at least in the sense that speaking authoritatively of rights and wrongs - as though the case is proven - is unwise.

I appreciate the form of your comment: A factual claim followed by a statement of uncertainty.

My argument is that the comment to which I was responding was a non sequitur premised on a number of unstated assumptions. I threw in a few examples to invite the reader to think laterally, to investigate. You question my argument, so I wonder: Have you done so? Have you put the thought in to examine the claim made, and to see what other assumptions are being hidden?

Regarding the facts you emphasize, I don't agree that "only" is a good modifier to place before "100-200 years" in this context. The 2000-4000 years you mention is entirely irrelevant, given survivorship bias.

It's not 'just' ancient artefacts.

There are also indigenous australian remains and artefacts stolen and refused to be returned.

Stolen up into the mid 20th century.

For readers after a more nuanced view with context:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2017/03-...

The problem with any Non Commercial licenses is where you draw the line. Say you want to mirror these images, can you show ads on the site to cover hosting costs ? What about asking for donations ? What if you want to print them and distribute to schools - can you get reimbursed for the paper ink and distribution costs ?

It gets murky pretty fast, often preventing people from even using such media as they fear possible issues down the line due to uncertainty. At the same time, any bootleggers won't care.

Due to this NC clauses are generally not recommended and are for example not part of any OCI accepted open source licenses.

"What if you want to print them and distribute to schools - can you get reimbursed for the paper ink and distribution costs"

That does not fit my mental definition of "commercial", which I would define as for profit. I'm sure there are corner cases but I don't think that is one of them.

Running ads whilst mirroring them - that might be hard to justify unless the revenue was only enough to support the website. Then you should wonder why mirror them at all? Now what about using them in a novel way which is ad supported? Probably OK, provided its at cost and you attribute the source.

Commercial usage includes any exchange of money, even if you're taking a huge financial loss by using the images, so this license prohibits all of that.

Really depends. Don't know about other countries, but French private pilotes (PPL) aren't allowed to fly commercially. Yet, they can and often do split the cost of the flight (fuel) with their passengers, and that is considered to be within the law.

Even though there is an exchange of money ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

'For profit' status isn't about actually making a profit, but about specific commercial arrangements. A money losing company doesn't suddenly become a 'non-profit'.

But no clue whether the license care about this?

That's the main issue as I see it - it makes many uses quite murky so people will just avoid those all together rather than risk someone deciding later on it was a comercial endeavour and thus breach of the license.

I'm not a lawyer, but that doesn't seem correct. What about non-profit or general interest associations? They achieve goals with transactions of money and goods, but not for profit. Are non-profit associations considered "commercial" ?

Commercial use in the context of copyright is not about money at all, but if the images are used to advertise a product or service. A newspaper could use a non commercial licensed photo to provide context to an article, even though the newspaper is made my a for profit company, they sell newspapers, and they charge for advertising. A newspaper could not use the same photo to advertise a product, even if the newspaper company is a non profit and gives the paper away for free.

Hopefully British museum just says yes to everyone but Getty.

Charging money for something is not a factor in whether something is a commercial use. It is only commercial use if the images are used for advertising purposes. None of your examples are murky, and none of them are commercial use.

Charging money has been a factor in commercial use in caselaw I've read, but it's not the only factor and isn't solely persuasive. Offering something for free can be commercial as it effects the market, reducing demand for commercial offerings.

Showing ads alongside content is absolutely commercial use for copyright purposes.

It sounds like you are talking about copyright in the context of fair use. Fair use matters for using work without permission from the rights holder. Editorial vs commercial for the purposes of a license has some difference in the legal standard. The nature of the work, affect on the market of the original etc is not a factor for editorial vs commercial.

Showing ads alongside content is not commercial use. You can use an NC licensed image on a blog with ads, or in a newspaper or magazine with ads as long as the image itself is not being used to advertise something.

> Is that really bad?

Yes, it's quite mean-spirited. Basically others are free to use the thing that the licenser made unless they're savvy enough to think of a way to make money from it, in which case the licenser gets pissy and says "nope". For no reason other than "I didn't think of that".

> in which case the licenser gets pissy and says "nope". For no reason other than "I didn't think of that".

This is certainly not the intent that I had when choosing that license for the photos I published.

I saw what Virgin Mobile Australia did[1][2] by pulling CC-BY attributed photos from Flickr and that cemented my position on not wanting my photos to be used in advertising.

[1] https://flickr.com/photos/sesh00/515961023/ [2] https://www.smh.com.au/technology/virgin-sued-for-using-teen...

>For no reason other than "I didn't think of that".

Of course there are other possible reasons. Many people have a range of relevant ideological positions on the profit motive, and when and where it should be applied.

Here's a blog post from a friend of mine that explains my viewpoint pretty well. Skip to "Issues with Creative Commons licensing" (or read the whole thing, it's not that long): https://blog.wolftune.com/2011/07/brain-parts-song-video.htm...

edit: I'll add on (my opinion, not from the post) that commercial use that actually respects the share-alike requirement is actually a good thing.

Say I take a photo and share it cc-by-sa, then a company adapts edits it to use on their website and releases the edited version cc-by-sa (as they are required to). Now anybody else can use their edited version, too. In effect, we've taken commercial dollars and put them towards adding to the commons. I think that's a great outcome, in a world where currently most FLO[1] works are extremely underfunded.

The type of commercial use that I'm opposed to is where a company takes something I (or others) make, embeds it into their proprietary product, and contributes nothing back to the FLO ecosystem (money or time). That's exploitative. But the share-alike requirement already prevents this, without creating incompatibility among otherwise FLO licenses.

[1]: https://wiki.snowdrift.coop/about/free-libre-open#flo

just use cc0, for god’s sake.

Yes I guess this is a controversial opinion: I do not consider anything that has the NC truly free. Pretty much all "free" datasets are NC-licensed, but they still throw around the word free. GPL is in a similar vein.

In the AV industry, there are a bunch of big datasets, all NC. At least now we have the Udacity sets and Audi recently released a really big dataset which was a proper CC BY-SA, Finally! This is something I with good conscious would be able to label free IMHO.

The GPL explicitly does not prevent commercial purposes or outright sale of covered works.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

> GPL is in a similar vein

The GPL is not-not-commercial, or in plainer terms, it's commercial.

I think that's a fair argument to make for GPL when you're talking about software, e.g. GIMP, which you could use to produce commercial art assets that you then sell. But for data, whether these images or audio clips or weather measurements or whatever, the requirement that derivative products also be licensed under GPL makes their use effectively non-commercial.

You can still sell them. I don't get how it makes them 'non-commercial'?

In many cases this had the effect that you can sell them only once since the buyer then has everything he needs to sell it, and will presumably do so for less.

While they could sell them for less they generally cannot sell as your product (name, logo, etc) is your copyright or trademark that you do not license when you license the code GPL.

CC-SA and GPL exist precisely to prohibit this kind of thing, except for your name, logo, etc., which someone can remove in order to resell your derivative work.

I've always thought that a bit unlikely - if someone is going through the trouble to resell they take on business costs, probably some support or maintenance costs, and a desire to profit (otherwise they'd just post the GPL'ed portion publicly). There's also no guarantee the reseller has access to any updated upstream code (especially in the situation that undercutting results in the originator stopping production). Legal? Definitely. Profitable? Maybe, sometimes.

As I understand GPL it has a provision to provide source code such that it may be modified by a recipient of source or compiled code. I can't find anything similar in CC-BY-SA [1] other than a grant that the recipient of compiled code may reverse engineer that code if they desire so long as anything that person adapts is also shared under a compatible license.

[1]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode

Answers.com used to make enough ad revenue from their copies of Wikipedia pages that they sponsored Wikimania with it. And of course Cygnus, Soft Landing Software, Slackware, Red Hat, CheapBytes, and so on, have made a great deal of money on GPL software, most of which they didn't write themselves.

It's true that CC-BY-SA doesn't include the source-code-provision provision of the GPL, because it isn't intended for software, and it isn't clear what the source code for, say, a photograph would be. A PSD, maybe; but what about the RAW from your camera? What if you don't shoot raw? Are you obligated to include documentation of the photographer's lighting setup in order to redistribute? Their thinking about the framing? Shots from the other angles they tried that didn't work out? Such considerations would probably have resulted in SA works being impossible to legally redistribute in practice, so the license doesn't impose them.

I wasn't aware of Answers.com; that's a great counter-example! I knew of a few of the others before this comment and I've viewed them as providing some amount of service or support for the price paid so yes they are selling GPL they didn't write, but they're selling something else (their time) along with it.

There's certainly an argument that selling support for software you didn't write (or didn't write in large part) is 'bad'. I also believe that if you are selling the (free/gratis, GPL) software without support you're not going to be in business long.

And all good points on the differences between CC & GPL, my only point was that selling compiled CC-BY-SA binaries provided security-through-obscurity level protection from someone reselling your product (when paired with trademark protection).

Thank you for all the things to think about!

Any works you produce using the GPL'd asset must also be GPL'd. So I can put a price-tag on my movie, comic book, AI model, or tutorial, but anyone else can also copy and redistribute my work with no legal recourse from me. It's hard to see the feasibility of commercial use.

The source for the engines of the first three quake and doom games were open sourced. I purchased those games after that happened. Worth mentioning that the engines were open sourced, not the assets. The assets are obviously a big part of the experience. But if not for the open source versions of their engines (prboom, ioquake3, etc) I'd not be playing these games today.

There's plenty of GPL software being sold. Mostly things that are niche enough that nobody cares to repost the source code.

And of course with AI models you could post a AGPL version publicly and sell more permissive licenses.

CC BY-SA is copyleft like GPL and it can be used in commercial products.

I feel like you are choosing your own definition of commercial that's not generally used when talking about licensing. Generally, a non-commercial license is one which forbids you from using the creation as part of a money-making venture. The GPL does not do that.

Except those that are reproductions of 2d public domain works... which means they aren't subject to copyright in the United States.

When you access a copy in the UK for the purposes of duplication, isn't that infringement in the UK?

I'm accessing the images under the terms of the license offered. It isn't my problem that they don't enjoy copyright protection in my country of residence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Portrait_Gallery_and_...

British Museum ... in the United States

> British Museum ... in the United States

Hey, think about export and re-import:

I use an image which is PD in the US to make a new work, whch gets reimported into the UK... where the image I used is not PD. What happens? It has to have come up.

The copyright holder can sue you in the UK, if they feel like it.

I'll release them on The Pirate Bay as CC-BY-SA. Don't worry.

If someone has a blog on tourism in Britain and has Adsense on the blog, does this mean he can't use these images even on pages that don't have Adsense?

Unfortunately, CC-NC does allow that kind of thing, even though to my eyes it's clearly commercial.

From one of the image descriptions:

To license images for charged-for journals and publications, and other commercial uses, please contact British Museum Images.

https://www.britishmuseum.org/terms-use/copyright-and-permis... links to permissions@bmimages.com and sales@bmimages.com

Interesting as one area they class as `allowed` would be "One-off classroom use"

Which seems odd, as that would mean you can only use a single image once in a classroom to educate students and never ever use that image again for as long as you teach to any other class of students.

That can't be right, is there a one-off definition in education that I'm unaware of?

I'd interpret it as being free to use for individual teachers, but if the school integrates it into their standard curriculum, then they've gotta pay.

I'm sure you're right. Which is kinda the crux, limiting an understanding of history thru taxation, whilst something small, it would soon with other information taxation costs end up creating a educational divide even wider than we have today.

I also feel that if they allowed and encouraged educational establishments to use them for free. They would create more potential customers who in their lifetime, would go a see them at the museum. So for a Museum, it would tick the PR, tourism, and visitors count boxes nicely. With that, I'm going to email them, though will craft the idea out more, any input welcome.

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