Rick Prelinger on Sun, 22 Apr 2001 07:43:36 +0200 (CEST) |
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Re: <nettime> Sounds like it could be handy |
Mr. Bad writes: >Specifically, Open Source software can be sold for money. Why can't I >sell your archived movies? Or show them in a theater? Why? Why? Why? > >Second, if most of the movies are in the public domain, why try to put >-any- restrictions on them? > You are misreading our restrictions slightly. You can show the movies in a theater, on TV, in a stadium, online, or anywhere you want using any means of distribution. You can incorporate the movies or segments from them into any kind of derivative work and sell or give away that work as your own. There are only two things we would prefer you not do: sell or take money for the original files, and/or use them to go into the stock footage business. Why? Two primary reasons. First, we would like to support nonprofit entities and promote public consciousness of what they can and should be doing. I wanted to concretely assist the expansion of public digital archives and libraries by donating online distribution rights to these films to a nonprofit rather than licensing them to a commercial enterprise. Typically, privately owned media collections are never released to the public in downloadable form. This project is a significant exception, and I think the credit for this should go to the nonprofit organization (IA) that has funded this project and created this public resource. The second restriction (no stock footage sales) is difficult to justify, but an unfortunate necessity. The 1001 films in the Internet Moving Images Archive come from my own collection (Prelinger Archives), which is quite large (about 48,000 titles) and expensive to maintain. We don't receive government or grant support; the income to maintain it and keep it open comes from commercial stock footage sales. Without this income, the collection would no longer exist. Although the company that represents us for stock footage sales has exclusive rights to sell footage, we do retain the rights to make complete films available on whatever terms we like. We have chosen to give away broadcast-quality versions of 1001 key films. Much content of significant cultural and historical importance resides in private collections. This initiative is an early instance of what I hope will one day become a common occurrence: opening up a private collection to the public. Perhaps we deviate slightly from the canonical definition of Open Source. If so, I apologize. I prefer to think that we are trying to find sustainable ground between the imperative to make information publicly available for free and the necessity to earn income to survive. For background on this project, please check the article at http://eserver.org/bs/52/prelinger.html. Rick Rick Prelinger Prelinger Archives http://www.prelinger.com P.O. Box 590622, San Francisco, Calif. 94159-0622 +1 415 750-0445 Fax: +1 415 750-0607 footage@panix.com # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net