And the same argument applies - why flickr? Or at least, why only flickr? Executives not willing to give up control is the answer. It's difficult for people who generally make a living from renting access to the public to imagine releasing something in a way that they couldn't revoke later. It's a major break from that possessive thinking to even release the stuff to a third party rather than commission some monstrous UI for their own site.
If you want it in the public domain, give it to archive.org or make torrents. The public will do the uploading to youtube and flickr.
The British Library charges extra if you want to reprint or republish pages from their out-of-copyright books and manuscripts. They also assert new copyrights when they photograph or microfilm things.
Greg is right. I am writing a book on the history of the southwest corner of modern China and saw an exhibition in the British Museum of British Library held historical copperplate prints produced in France for a Chinese emperor in the Ming Dynasty of his campaigns in the area (eg. the spectacular tropical/karst landscape pacification of Annam, or modern day north Vietnam). There are about 5 of these things I'm interested in, and the bastards wanted ~500GBP per image to photograph them for me for research purposes, with an explicitly threatening legal statement that this would grant no republishing rights. I mean, come on! Talk about holding the world's heritage hostage!
PS. I believe they obtained the pieces by invading Beijing... on the then Qing dynasty government's ever-so-serious provocation of refusing to issue free trading rights to foreign nations, in England's case mostly to distribute vast quantities of cut-rate opium produced in slave-like conditions by its Indian subjects to the Chinese population. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Opium_War
And the same argument applies - why flickr? Or at least, why only flickr? Executives not willing to give up control is the answer. It's difficult for people who generally make a living from renting access to the public to imagine releasing something in a way that they couldn't revoke later. It's a major break from that possessive thinking to even release the stuff to a third party rather than commission some monstrous UI for their own site.
If you want it in the public domain, give it to archive.org or make torrents. The public will do the uploading to youtube and flickr.