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

Posted by samzenpus on from the insert-image-here dept.

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."

5 of 371 comments (clear)

  1. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  2. Re:Global Visual Culture From Preshistory to 1800 by OAB_X · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Museums don't let you by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. Re:Global Visual Culture From Preshistory to 1800 by mcvos · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  5. It was an accident! by lahvak · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    AccountKiller