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Carl Malamud (board member at Mozilla Foundation and former chairman of the Internet Software Consortium) talks about problems with the copyright restrictions on the images warehoused at the Smithsonian Institution and available online. By distributing the memo, Public.Resource.Org hopes to achieve three goals:
" 1. The unwieldy archive of low-resolution images on the Smithsonian site makes it hard for people to ascertain the public domain status of the vast majority of these images. By placing the database on sites such as Flickr and in convenient-to-examine PDF and tarball formats, we hope that the Internet commnunity is able to form a better judgement.
2. Some images are clearly in the public domain and of immense public importance. For these images, our nonprofit organization is attempting to systematically purchase these images and place them on the net for use without restriction.
3. We would like to see the Smithsonian adopt a policy for on-line distribution that is much more closely aligned to their mission, focusing on vastly increasing the store of public domain materials available on the Internet."

http://public.resource.org/memo.2007.05.19.html

Food for thought.