Respectful request for advice.

Dear list members I would value any advice you can offer.

I am a design manager at the Naturla History Museum in London - where we have agreed to work with a group of EEC partners on the development of a 'Virtual Gallery'.

The funding is from the European ACTS programme developed to explore precompetative technologies.

We are working with a company developing a massive, scalable supercomputer capable of delivering interactive video on demand via high bandwidth (ATM) networks into homes etc. The Virtual Gallery will be populated with 2d/3d copied, rendered and scanned objects from our own and possibly other information providers resources - including other Museums and video archives.

The computer and this application will then be tested on a number of trials - within Museum's and distributed over cable networks. We are working on the partnership agreement and on the rights issues. As we have holders rights we do wish to exert them - among other reasons this will be essential to bring other information providers on board into a project which has exciting educational, outreach possibilities for the future. Current issues/questions are:

• How we should say that images from originals provided by content providers will be used solely for the purpose of the 'Application' and not used independently without permission from the source providers.
• That the application will be used freely for the purpose of the 'trials' (this is a potential problem as the project has not defined the scope of these trials and they may well change with new partners or national hosts)- we need a form of words which recognises this - or do we need to agree the scope of the trial?
• That if there is potential use beyond the trial we will need some sort of licencing agreement which permits the main partners to use it and protects the interests of information providers. One possible problem here is addressing what is meant by a user or site licence given the issue of distribution over net-works etc.

Any comments/suggestions you have would be appreciated, probably directly to me unless the issue generates important questions for discussion.

Regards Bob Bloomfield
<rmb[_at_]nhm.ac.uk> Received on Thu Oct 26 1995 - 13:27:02 GMT