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Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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

> 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.

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