Art School's Expensive Art History Textbook Contains No Actual Art

Dr Herbert West writes "Students at Ontario College of Art and Design were forced to buy a $180 textbook filled with blank squares. Instead of images of paintings and sculpture throughout history (that presumably would fall under fair-use) the textbook for 'Global Visual and Material Culture: Prehistory to 1800' features placeholders with a link to an online image. A letter from the school's dean stated that had they decided to clear all the images for copyright to print, the book would have cost a whopping $800. The screengrabs are pretty hilarious, or depressing, depending on your point of view."

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Re:Global Visual Culture From Preshistory to 1800

[OAB_X]

You can't just go into a museum and take a picture of something and have it be good enough for print. You need the proper lighting, etc, etc.

That and presumably the museum could refuse you access if you were going to take pictures for commercial purposes.

Re:Global Visual Culture From Preshistory to 1800

[cpt kangarooski]

Yes, while such slavish copying would not result in a copyrightable photograph here in the US, the school and textbook in this case are Canadian, and it is likely that photographs of public domain works in which nothing creative is added by the photographer are copyrightable anyway for some reason.

Re:Global Visual Culture From Preshistory to 1800

[wvmarle]

The cost of hiring a professional photographer to travel to all these museums (and probably a bunch of private collectors) and take all these photographs is probably higher than just buying these photographs from someone.

Anyway at $180 a book one would expect to be able to get photos in it. The $800 each for copyright clearance as TFS claims sounds totally unrealistic to me. Works that are in museums should have photos available at low cost; privately owned works maybe a little more but also not too much. It's mostly stock photo work after all.

Re:Global Visual Culture From Preshistory to 1800

[AK Marc]

But you can't copyright something that isn't creative, and a picture of something designed to be as un-creative as possible (faithful to the original) is not copyrightable, even if it takes considerable skill and time to achieve the effect.

Museums don't let you

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't go into a museum and take a photograph, BECAUSE THEY DON'T LET YOU. They'll provide photographs if you want, but only under license.

So the paintings are out of copyright, but the DRM, erm phyical barrier to them, WILL GO ON FOREVER. This is necessary to encourage Picaso to paint more painting, Van Gogh needs to be rewarded to paint more.

Re:Museums don't let you

[jimicus]

Taking this approach is well and good if you're an individual who wants a photo as a souvenir.

If you're a textbook publisher and you want well lit, high quality photos you can include in a textbook - and you're going to need hundreds of such photos because it's an art history book - you realistically have two choices:

  - Hire a couple of photographers (Eeeks! Expensive)
  - Send them to every museum you can think of that has works that are worth photographing.
  - Ask them to take photos as discreetly as possible. With a couple of studio flashes, a good quality lens, an SLR and a tripod. And keep going back when they inevitably get kicked out until they've built up enough photographs.
  - In the case of sculptures, remove them from their glass cases and spend ages arranging the lighting so the whole thing appears clearly without getting thrown out and/or arrested.

OR

  - Buy photographs that the museum has already got at the fee the museum wants, on the understanding that the photographs will go into a printed book for students to look at.

I'd say the second one is a lot cheaper, and a lot less likely to guarantee you'll never work with a museum again.

Re:Museums don't let you

[Anonymous Coward]

Not entirely correct. They'll get you on taking pictures on private property, copyright is not necessary. Even if you own the copyright of the resulting photograph, you don't have the right to publish it.

But even beyond that, "weird" lighting and semi-reflective glass cases is all it takes.

Re:Museums don't let you

[Zobeid]

I don't understand how its even possible for the photograph to be copyrighted. As far as I know, copyright only applies to original works. If I take a photo of a 100 year old painting, my photo isn't an original work. It's just a copy. How is that copyrightable?

I could use it in a collage or something, transform it in some way, and make something out of it that's copyrightable, but I don't see any way that a straight-up photo of the painting can be. Does not make sense. (But then, there's a lot about copyright law these days that doesn't make sense to me.)

Re:Global Visual Culture From Preshistory to 1800

[mcvos]

This is how many public domain works end up recopyrighted. Nobody is allowed to take photos of the original, and the only existing photos are copyrighted. This especially happens after an historic work of art has had some work done to restore it to its original glory. The old photos all show the unrestored version, and all photos of the restored version are recent and copyrighted. It's an ugly practice and needs to be outlawed.

It was an accident!

[lahvak]

It is pretty clear what happened. They are using a system that automatically
downloads and inserts the images at the time the book is typeset. On the final
run just before printing, someone accidentally switched on the draft mode.
Nobody checked the pdf file, and they ended with several hundreds printed textbooks with placeholders for all the images.

They wanted to throw them away, but someone had the brilliant idea to pretend it was done on purpose, because of copyright issues.