A Tremendous Hullabaloo
The Smithsonian Showtime Situation
When the Smithsonian Institution signed a secret contract with Showtime to create “Smithsonian-On-Demand,” many questions were raised. The secretary called it all a hullabaloo but the kerfuffle would not go away.
View the full hearing. (Courtesy of C-SPAN)
Slide Number 2 from the "Hacking Government" talk at OSCON 2006.
See the talk in the original context on
the Internet Archive.
6,288 Photographs
Are Smithsonian Images Public Domain?
In a Memorandum to the Internet
we posited the theory that the SmithsonianImages.Com site was artificially restricting the
public domain by asserting copyright on images they did not own. Indeed, the whole point
of the public domain is you don't have to ask for permission, yet the Institution had
required each and every use to be vetted.
Since careful examination yielded substantial evidence that the images were indeed in the public domain, they were harvested and uploaded to Flickr, which managed to attract the attention of the relevant authorities.
[View 6,288 Images on Flickr]
[View the Smithsonian's New PD Photostream]
PAPER TRAIL
TRACKBACK—Boing Boing
TRACKBACK—Washington Post
