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-- OriginalOwner_ [tinyurl.com] writes:

from the finding-the-least-worst-method dept.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announces [metmuseum.org]

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 [metmuseum.org], 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 [metmuseum.org]. 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.

TechDirt notes [techdirt.com]

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 [creativecommons.org], 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.

Original Submission