What is 'digital art history'? (ctd.)
March 7 2013
Picture: Courtauld Institute
Following my post below on digital art history, reader Neil Jeffares tweets:
The current quagmire around image copyright & failure to sort out the law restricts the full power of digital art history.
Quite so. I was discussing the new UK copyright laws at a meeting at The National Archives today. The new laws will make life very difficult for art historians, especially the rules about 'orphan' works, or those where you are not sure who holds the copyright. This is often the case for old photographs of paintings.
So if, for example, the Witt Library at the Courtauld wanted to digitise its collection of old photographs, as the RKD in Holland has begun to do, it would now have to pay an 'orphan' rights fee to the government for every individual photograph where it wasn't sure who owned the copyright. In other words, most of the photographs in the Witt Library. And the Witt Library would only be able to do that after it had conducted a 'diligent', and expensive, search to find the copyright holder of each individual photograph. So in effect the new laws will make it impossible to make mass digitisations of old photographs. It will simply be too expensive.
Yet another legislative success by the UK government, and also, in this case, the EU.
