[Wiki Loves Monuments] MIBAC agreement for Wiki Loves Monuments in Italy

Thu Sep 13 13:44:44 UTC 2012

Wow!!!!! I know how hard was this for all of you... felicidades!!!!

Sorry the length, I'm on my cellphone... ;-)
El 13/09/2012 09:57, "Andrea Zanni" <zanni.andrea84 at gmail.com> escribió:

> Dear all,
>
> Great news from Italy! After over one year of talks between Wikimedia
> Italia and MiBAC, the Italian Ministry of Cultural and Artistic Heritage
> (MiBAC is a quasi-acronym from its official Italian denomination "Ministero
> per i Beni e le Attività Culturali"), we have managed to sign an agreement
> which will allow us to participate to Wiki Loves Monuments in a much
> broader way that we could before. MiBAC explicitly states in the agreement
> that *«the Ministry considers particularly useful, in order to promote
> awareness of such goods [the ones managed by the Ministry - note that this
> is different from "owned by the Ministry", see below], the production of
> specific items about them on wikipedia.org, in all its languages, and the
> publication of images on Wikimedia Commons, at the site
> http://commons.wikimedia.org.» <http://commons.wikimedia.org.xn--yba/>* Moreover,
> it will explicitly ask to its local branches to give us the list of
> "lesser" monuments, those which are not usually known but are nonetheless
> beautiful... and poorly described in Wikipedia. Italian law however puts
> some constraints unrelated to copyright issues: this means that the
> pictures uploaded must bear the the template {{Italy-MiBAC-disclaimer}}[1].
> The text of the disclaimer is shown below; to understand what it actually
> means we put up this text, which provides a bit of context about the
> history of the agreement and the Italian law.
>
> As you know, Wiki Loves Monuments started in 2010, and went European in
> 2011. Wikimedia Italy wanted to participate to that edition, but we
> discovered a great obstacle to the project, a law called "Codice Urbani"[2].
>
> "Codice Urbani" is an Italian law which states, among other provisions,
> that to publish pictures of "cultural goods" (meaning in theory every
> cultural and artistical object/place) for commercial purposes it is
> mandatory to obtain an authorization from the local branch of the Ministry
> of Arts and Cultural Heritage, the "Soprintendenza"[3]. The Superintendence
> can require the payment of a fee; moreover, the authorization granted is
> will be for the requester only (usually a publishing company) and only for
> a given publication. Personal use and use for study and research are
> allowed without a request for authorization. You certainly noticed that
> Codice Urbani is problematic for a smooth realization of Wiki Loves
> Monuments. In fact, I can make pictures of monuments I can give up my
> copyright allowing others to copy my image without requiring my explicit
> permission; but the Codice Urbani says that if I want to publish those
> picture a fee can be requested to me, so anyway a third party can't make
> profit out of my picture without asking in advance an authorization to the
> Soprintendenza. This issue is completely independent from any issue
> regarding copyright: Coliseum and the Leaning Tower fall (no pun intended)
> under Codice Urbani. So we were in difficulty in organizing a photocampaign
> in Italy and asking people to (potentially) break the Italian law, since
> the unclear points where many.
>
> We started challenging this problems in Summer 2011: we contacted people
> from the Ministry, we set up a draft of the project, we met once in Rome to
> speak with high delegates. To make a long story short, we managed to obtain
> the promise of receiving the lists of the monuments which could be
> photographed: but then things slowed down, our contacts were moved to other
> offices, and the Ministry himself (who was aware of the project) was
> replaced or political reasons (unrelated to WLM, of course). Thus, we could
> not participate in WLM 2011.
>
> In December 2011 we started working out a new strategy: meanwhile, as you
> can imagine, endless discussions were made in our mailing lists. We
> contacted NEXA Center for Internet and Society[4a], an institution from the
> University of Turin which supports and promotes Creative Commons: they are
> actually the official contact for Creative Commons in Italy! We decided to
> allocate some resources and hired Deborah De Angelis[4b], a lawyer
> specialized in Creative Commons and cultural heritage. Deborah, who is
> based in Rome, started contacting again the (renewed) Ministry of Cultural
> Heritage, proposing a draft for an agreement between the Ministry and
> Wikimedia Italia. Several months of discussions and bouncing of documents
> followed.
>
> In January Wikimedia Italy also hired a Project Manager for Wiki Loves
> Monuments, Emma Tracanella. Emma started developing and pursuing another
> tactic developed by WMI to get permission for taking pictures of monuments:
> asking directly the authorization to specific municipalities and
> institutions. In fact, it is the "owners" of a monument who have the right
> to authorize pictures of it. It's Codice Urbani itself which gives them
> these rights, indeed.
>
> Thus, we had two strategies: one top-down, that is discussing with the
> MiBac to obtain an agreement clearly stating that we could organize Wiki
> Loves Monuments in Italy, and explaining which were the boundaries of the
> law (the dream here would have been to change the law itself, but we would
> have needed to bring the issue in Parliament, and more urged matters
> pressed); the other bottom-up, that is asking the permissions to the single
> institutions. Note that the bottom-up strategy meant having to deal with
> 8000+ different municipalities, endless cultural institutions, uncountable
> churches (every parish priest has the right for is own parish, unless this
> is in some special list from the Ministry). We let you imagine the
> complexity of the landscape that was opening in front of us: it was a
> nightmare, but at least it could give us some "free" monuments.
>
> Emma started making calls to everyone who could give us authorization for
> taking photo of monuments. We started spreading the word, calling friends
> of friends for help, starting a blog (our wikilovesmonuments.it), begging
> for authorization everywhere. We had a great ally in APT Services, the
> Tourist office for Emilia Romagna, with which we already partnered in the
> past for some Wikipedia-related projects; they organized meetings with
> mayors and regional politicians. In the end, we reached different regions
> and provinces, and several municipalities (here there is a list[5]). Our
> list of monuments counts in hundreds, and it's still improving everyday
> (here there is a map of the lists[6]). A drop in the ocean, if you think at
> the enormous Italian cultural heritage: but it is all we managed to get.
>
> This up to yesterday. Today, we had finally an answer from MiBAC, and it
> was positive. The Ministry signed an agreement with Wikimedia Italia saying
> that:
>
>    - the Ministry, with the aim of promoting the knowledge of the Italian
>    Cultural Heritage, finds useful that the monuments have an article on
>    Wikipedia with photographs. (yes, it is *actually* saying that).
>    - the Ministry will send an internal communication asking to every
>    Soprintendenza to send us a list of the monuments they control, along with
>    a permission to take photos of them. Pics of these monuments can be
>    released in CC-BY-SA, in the sense that the maker of the photograph can
>    relinquish his own rights; no fee is needed to be paid to the monuments'
>    owners by the photographer if he does not want to use them for commercial
>    purposes.
>
> As part of the agreement, we however have to add a disclaimer to the
> pictures; the one in {{Italy-MiBAC-disclaimer}}. The text of the advice is
> shown below:
> *This image reproduces a property belonging to the Italian cultural
> heritage as entrusted to the Italian government. Such images are regulated
> by Articles 106 et seq. of the Italian Code of Cultural Heritage and
> Landscape under Legislative Decree No. 42, dated January 22, 2004, and its
> subsequent amendments. These regulations, unrelated to copyright
> regulations, establish a system for the protection Italy’s historic and
> artistic heritage and its standards of dignity. Among other things, these
> regulations provide for the payment of a concession fee by those who intend
> to benefit economically from reproductions of property belonging to the
> Italian cultural heritage. Reproduction of this image is permitted for
> personal use or study. A further authorization by the Italian Ministry of
> Heritage and Culture is required for reproduction for any other purpose,
> and particularly for commercial use. Such commercial use includes, but is
> not limited to, use in (a) any form of advertising, and (b) any company
> name, logo, trademark, image, activity, or product.*
>
> Our lawyers (which are people from Creative Commons Italy) assure us that
> this license is compatible with CC-BY-SA, because the provisions of the
> license, which deals only with intellectual propriety, is saved and the
> limitation occurs on another, different, level. In other words, the
> photographer releases the picture in CC-BY-SA, the Ministry allows to put
> it on Commons waiving its own right to get a fee, but Codice Urbani keeps
> staying in force, protecting the pics from automatic commercial use by
> third parties. To be more explicit, please have a look the the section 5 of
> the Legal Code of Creative Commons CC-BY-SA-3.0 [7], which we are quoted
> below: boldface is ours.
> *5. Representations, Warranties and Disclaimer* *Unless otherwise
> mutually agreed to by the parties in writing, licensor offers the work
> as-is and makes no representations or warranties of any kind concerning the
> work, express, implied, statutory or otherwise, including, without
> limitation, warranties of title, merchantibility, fitness for a
> particular purpose, noninfringement, or the absence of latent or other
> defects, accuracy, or the presence of absence of errors, whether or not
> discoverable. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied
> warranties, so such exclusion may not apply to you*
>
> As you may see, it's true that the author of the photo cannot vouch for
> the merchantability of the images, since this is not a right of his/her;
> but CC-BY-SA explicitly takes into account that case.
>
> To the best of our knowledge, this agreement is the first one of its kind
> in Italy, and sees an official recognition of the existence of Creative
> Commons licenses; moreover, it is a necessary step towards new regulations
> recognizing the importance of the free dissemination of information about
> the cultural and artistic heritage, which cannot just be "museum stuff". We
> are thrilled to see what will come out, and how Italians will answer to
> this challenge. We are very proud to have obtained this.
>
> Feel free to ask us anything you think relevant, we'll do what we can to
> answer. We are also open to prepare some FAQ, if we see the need for them.
>
> Best regards,
> Cristian and Andrea
> on behalf of the Wiki Loves Monuments organizing committee in Italy
> References
>
> [1] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Italy-MiBAC-disclaimer
>
> [2] http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codice_Urbani
>
> [3] http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soprintendenze
>
> [4a] http://nexa.polito.it/
>
> [4b] http://nexa.polito.it/fellows
>
> [5] http://www.wikilovesmonuments.it/istituzioni/
>
> [6] http://www.wikilovesmonuments.it/monumenti/lista-monumenti/ ; also on
> wiki at:
> http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progetto:Wiki_Loves_Monuments_2012/Monumenti
>
> [7] http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode
>
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> http://www.wikilovesmonuments.org
>
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