User:Fæ/email/NHM
Subject: NHM digitization and releases of "Bulletin of the Natural History Museum"
To: <***@nhm.ac.uk>
Dear ***,
[...] I hope you can clarify the intended copyright of older editions of the "Bulletin of the Natural History Museum". I am an volunteer with Wikimedia Commons, having worked with the NHM as a volunteer in the past, and as part of one of our open knowledge projects have released several hundred images from the Bulletin. An example image file with associated links, copyright statement and a deletion discussion can be found in the Links section below.
The way these images came to be on Wikimedia Commons and originally released by the NHM was in following stages:
- The bulletin was scanned and released by the NHM in partnership with the Biodiversity Heritage Library.
- Released by the BHL to the Internet Archive website.
- Relevant automatically generated crops of images posted to Flickr Commons, on the Internet Archive official stream under 'No Known Copyright', the default license for that type of release.
- Batch uploaded to Wikimedia Commons from Flickr, with the license confirmed by automated verification.
I believe it was the intention of the NHM to share copies of the Bulletin as widely as possible with the public, and having images and diagrams from the Bulletin on Wikimedia Commons has the distinct benefit that they can be easily included in Wikipedia articles with associated public impact.
Could you clarify whether these images can be considered public domain, or on a free license compatible with Wikimedia Commons such as CC-BY-SA? Unfortunately if the Bulletin should be on a non-commercial or no derivatives restriction than they will have to be deleted from Wikimedia Commons.
If rather than a literal IP question, this is more an issue of NHM policy, perhaps you could suggest an alternative contact for me to approach?
Thanks in advance,
[Fae]
Links:
- Example Wikimedia Commons file: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bulletin_of_the_Natural_Histort_Museum._Geology_series_%281996%29_%2820485927112%29.jpg
- Internet Archive catalogue page: https://archive.org/details/bulletinofnatura52natu
- BHL catalogue page: http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/53542 (copyright "not specified")
- Commons deletion discussion: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Deletion_requests/File:Bulletin_of_the_Natural_Histort_Museum._Geology_series_%281996%29_%2820485927112%29.jpg