@Linda – yes, and that’s a really valuable point. The fear of whatever this new thing is is absolutely understandable. Loss of control is at the heart of it, and it is so easy to see why that loss of control is challenging, both intellectually and financially.

The thing is (and what I boringly bang on about all the time) – this stuff is *happening*, as this example demonstrates. And I could go out there tomorrow and do the same to any other cultural heritage website, using simple tools I’d built myself or stuff that is freely available like YQL or whatever.

What we as a sector need to come up with are ways to react to the fact that this is inevitable. If stuff is online, people *will* use it, pirate it, copy it, mash it. Maybe our reaction will/should be – “well, balls to this, let’s just *remove* the bloody stuff, then” – and that might be the right answer. But court cases just aren’t, surely…