Museums, copyright and photography
June 1 2012
Picture: BG
An article by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker on e-literate* looks at how digital access to museum collections will change the way museums control their online presence:
There are some hopeful signs. Recently, a few museums (The National Gallery of Art, The Brooklyn Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art for example) have begun to offer public domain images for download. We hope more museums will recognize that in the digital era, the old model of controlling and charging for reproductions of public domain work flies in the face of their mission. Museums, and the artists’ rights organizations (such as ARS and VAGA) and the estates they work with, need to do far more to make the shared cultural heritage they hold in trust, accessible. Peter Samis, Associate Curator, Interpretive Media at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art recently asked, “Are the artworks ours to give? Are they ours to withhold?”
Now that the value of a global art platform is evident, will museums think differently about sharing resources with each other and the public? The Google Art Project shows what can happen when museums work in parallel; now imagine what could happen if museums choose to work together.
Quite. As AHN has said before, the way some UK museums restrict their online presence merely to protect copyright achieves nothing other than to turn people away from their websites. People these days expect high-res images like those on the Google Art Project. Anything less just looks ancient. And of course, the most pointless copyright defenders of all are those that prevent photography.
Personally, I'm not a fan of museums charging for scholarly reproductions. But for those museums that do, it should be perfectly possible to maintain a decent image reproduction revenue and still allow both decent images on websites, and photography. The vast majority of publishers will always pay for image fees, not least because they tend to obey the law, and there's very little point in sending a photographer to a museum just to save £50 on a reproduction fee. And no matter how hard museums try, it's too late to stop those ubiquitous Chinese reproduction sites.
