Hi, I had been visiting the webpage of the French museum of instruments about six months ago, and I was able to download the images as needed.

Now, unfortunately, some smartass created a system to hinder an easy way of downloading the images. This is really horrible considering that the instruments in the museum are the product of people who died centuries ago and should be information readily available to anyone interested.

They are using a SWF file, which has some parameters that allow displaying the image.

Is there any way of inspecting that SWF file (merely a viewer) so as to get the url links of the images?

The webpage I'm talking about is:

http://mediatheque.cite-musique.fr/C...6&TYPEDOC=CMIM

As you see, the image is displayed through a flash application that hinders the "save image" feature. Is there any way of inspecting the location of the image files? I'm sure it must be somewhere, I even downloaded their ****ty "zoom" program with which they display the files (something .swf).

Regards,

X.

The information is there for anyone to read, it's simply that you cannot STEAL the images.

The images are the property AND copyright of the museum NOT free for anyone to use as they see fit.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

The information is there for anyone to read, it's simply that you cannot STEAL the images.

The images are the property AND copyright of the museum NOT free for anyone to use as they see fit.

It would be great if you clarify with what moronic definition of the word "steal" you go by.

A copyright doesn't mean that you cannot get a private, personal copy for offline use, for educational purposes.

You don't need to steal what's already yours, and, my friend, the creations of people who died more than 200 years ago are already public domain according to all legislation around the world. That copyright is for the photo, and even then, it's quite pushing it to pretend that what makes the picture interesting is the technical photograph and not the creation of the real artist.

The idea behind a museum is that the institution preserves some kind of human culture and makes it readily available to anyone interested. And of course it's not to try to keep people from learning things.

Only pinheads would try to hinder the access and make obscure information such as this. The sort that love to put a stick on the wheel, as the French say.

But your distorted conception of the word "stealing" fits the European museum like a glove, particularly when it doesn't mean to loot around the world while displaying ruthless colonialism, but for someone to try to get a copy of the photograph of such objects.

Then if the images are already "yours" just ask the museum for a copy of the image you can use as your "personal copy"

You could just press print screen on your keyboard and paste it into paint. Then crop out all the stuff you dont want.

They *may of done it without realising people cant download the images. ( as the flash thing is a feature to help zoom and see more of the image )

Originally Posted by lynxus

You could just press print screen on your keyboard and paste it into paint. Then crop out all the stuff you dont want.

They *may of done it without realising people cant download the images. ( as the flash thing is a feature to help zoom and see more of the image )

Thanks, I'm already aware of that sort of "low-tech" approach. Thank you anyway for trying to be helpful.

I would loose some quality re-compressing, or could save the file as bitmaps.

And by the way, I think you're maybe right about them not trying to hinder the downloading of their pictures, but just plainly not making it easy by chance. All this supposedly great technology, like flash, and all that cr*p tends to make everything transparent to you, you don't get to see the inner workings, which is rather irritating when you're of the curious kind.

I found another work-around: I don't know anything about html programming, or stuff like that, but I discovered that there's a way to recall the picture in what it seems is the quality in which they stored it.

It's a jpeg file, and you don't access it in a typical path like /whatever/whatever/ etc. but something like:

http://mediatheque.cite-musique.fr/s...=CMIM000027751

(by the way, I've got the link from the museum pages themselves, just removed some sort of resolution limit that was at the end at the link, something like max=300 or something in the like)

Just being curious, is there ANYTHING you can do with such a link to try to get the URL of the original image? I don't really need to, I get the picture just the same, but since this is a forum about web-programmers, is there any way to "debug" what the asp is doing from such a link?

Regards,

X.

Originally Posted by chrishirst

Then if the images are already "yours" just ask the museum for a copy of the image you can use as your "personal copy"

I might. Actually other official French pages, like that of the National Library, have plenty of books readily downloadable in pdf format.

To have something copyrighted doesn't mean you don't have the right to store that image in your hard-drive as far as I know. Or else it would be illegal when you click on "save webpage as" in an article of some online newspaper.

Not to mention that you can only claim "copyright" when dealing with books, art, or objects dating more than two centuries about the digitization process only, which is really lame... some lousy photographer claiming "copyright" for just taking the picture of one violin, or for scanning and old book, it seems excessive.

They should introduce the idea of how much original work is involved in those processes, so that you cannot get a Rembrandt, store it in your basement, and claim copyright on the only photograph of the work that you let the world watch.

Regards,

X.

derivative work