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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday February 11 2017, @03:51AM   Printer-friendly
from the finding-the-least-worst-method dept.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announces

Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, announced [February 7] its adoption of a new policy: all images of public-domain artworks in the Museum's collection are now available for free and unrestricted use. This updated policy, known as Open Access, utilizes the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) designation. This policy change is an update to The Museum's 2014 Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC) initiative. The Met's Open Access policy facilitates the use of more than 375,000 images of public-domain artworks for both scholarly and commercial purposes. The Museum is collaborating with global partners to enable greater access to the collection.

In making the announcement, Mr. Campbell said: "We have been working toward the goal of sharing our images with the public for a number of years. Our comprehensive and diverse museum collection spans 5,000 years of world culture and our core mission is to be open and accessible for all who wish to study and enjoy the works of art in our care. Increasing access to the Museum's collection and scholarship serves the interests and needs of our 21st-century audiences by offering new resources for creativity, knowledge, and ideas. We thank Creative Commons, an international leader in open access and copyright, for being a partner in this effort."

"Sharing is fundamental to how we promote discovery, innovation, and collaboration in the digital age," said Ryan Merkley, CEO, Creative Commons. "Today, The Met has given the world a profound gift in service of its mission: the largest encyclopedic art museum in North America has eliminated the barriers that would otherwise prohibit access to its content, and invited the world to use, remix, and share their public-domain collections widely and without restriction. This is an enormous gift to the world, and it is an act of significant leadership on the part of the institution. I want to congratulate Thomas P. Campbell, the board of trustees, and The Met staff for making such a strong commitment to collaboration and sharing, and I hope that other institutions, both public and private, will follow the path they are setting out here today."

To maximize the reach of The Met's Open Access initiative, the Museum announced its new partnerships with Creative Commons, Wikimedia, Artstor, Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), Art Resource, and Pinterest. The Museum also welcomes its first Wikimedian-in-Residence, Richard Knipel, who will collaborate with Wikimedians around the world to bring images of public-domain artworks into Wikimedia Commons, Wikipedia, and diverse GLAM-Wiki initiatives. Creative Commons will support search and re-use of The Met collection with its CCSearch beta at https://ccsearch.creativecommons.org/themet. The Met has also created a public GitHub repository.

[Continues...]

TechDirt notes

This is all great, but here's the annoying thing: it should be totally unnecessary. These are digitizations of public domain works, and there's no reasonable basis for granting them any copyright protection that would need to be divested with a CC0 mark in the first place. They are not creative transformative works, and in fact they are the opposite: attempts to capture the original as faithfully and accurately as possible, with no detectable changes in the transfer from one medium to another. It might take a lot of work, but sweat of the brow does not establish copyright, and allowing such images to be re-copyrighted (in some cases hundreds or even thousands of years after their original creation) would be pointless and disastrous.

Instead of the CC0 mark, the Met should be able to use a lesser-known Creative Commons tool: the Public Domain Mark, which indicates that something you are sharing is already in the public domain (whereas CC0 declares that you have rights in it, but are relinquishing them and releasing it to the public domain).

And while the Met probably could have done so (and likely discussed this with CC since they were partners in this project), it's understandable why they decided not to: the statutory public domain is so damn weak and vulnerable that it can't be trusted, and a CC0 license is actually a much stronger way of ensuring nobody tries to exert control over these works in the future.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @03:12PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @03:12PM (#465779)

    If copy'right' didn't last an insane amount of time we wouldn't have this problem (it's not a 'right' it's a privilege). This is what happens when psychotic corporations buy laws instead of allowing the laws to be democratically selected (and the dishonesty of calling a privilege a 'right' is what happens when dishonest corporations get to define the language. But I see this dishonest terminology as proof of the dishonesty that went behind making these laws, makes it hard for those that defend these laws to spin them as being made with an honest intent).