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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."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is what great art has come to in our time: Michaelangelo's "Broken Link"
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
They seem to believe that a url where you can see it online is as good as having it printed right in fromt of you. Were I one of those parents I would just hand then a piece of paper with a link to a picture of $180. Fair is fair.
Well file this under no fucking shit.
Schools don't care, because they are making filthy money off of them, that have no incentive to do anything to reduce the prices.
Maybe the photographs they wanted to use were copyrighted, not the artwork, per se... they were too lazy to take their own pictures? For a $180 book they should have the budget. Heck, I've been to many of those museums, I'd be happy to go back and take pix if they'd pay for the trip.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Before I got halfway into the summary, I started to think that this was some kind of self-referential post-modern art book.
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.
Even a poor snapshot is better than a blank white square.
Link from summary - Salon: "This article originally appeared on Hyperallergic. "
Hyperallergic - "What is this, October!? According to a blog post"
Original Source: http://www.ashleyit.com/blogs/brentashley/2012/09/16/copyright-and-the-pictureless-art-history-textbook/
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.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
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.
OCAD is a very well known and respected school in Ontario. The school itself is not a scam. Having a textbook custom created by a company (Prentice Hall) is very expensive. And the economies of scale that come with a very large run for dozens of schools are not present. Especially if the photographs need to be licensed at a flat rate.
They've since invented codes that go along with the book - required to view online information and submit assignments, if the teacher is using their online framework.
Naturally the code is only functional for a single semester, so even if you buy a used book, or share a book, you need your own code to submit assignments.
They'll gladly sell you just the code, for the low fee of... almost as much as a new book+code cost.
Cancerous as hell...
Even a poor snapshot is better than a blank white square
You forgot one thing -
A book filled with poor snapshots will not make Slashdot
A book filled with blank white squares ... will
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Sure, ok, but what makes more sense to give to art students: a book with a bunch of empty boxes, or an "off-the-shelf" book with pictures of the art? Whatever benefit they supposedly get from a custom-made book they should be able to get from lecture and teachers notes, at least compared to the bother and expense of the shite they ended up with.
OCAD is a very well known and respected school in Ontario. The school itself is not a scam. Having a textbook custom created by a company (Prentice Hall) is very expensive.
And was it really necessary to have a custom-created Art History textbook?
Those two core Art History classes (covering pre-history to around the year 1400, and the second covering 1400 to 1945) are a requirement for literally everyone who studies Art, regardless of major or if they're pursuing a BA or BFA, painting, sculpture, or graphic design, etc. It's not like there weren't oodles of candidate textbooks for their curriculum to choose from.
The joke of this story is that the Art History department actually went along with Prentice Hall on this scam, instead of turning right around and looking elsewhere.
Anyone here teaching a course might be interested in the comprehensive new textbook I'm writing. It has an attractive hard cover, a quality binding, and a single page inside which lists the URLs for Google and Wikipedia. My planned retail price is $499, but I'm willing to offer a volume discount.
"FDA staff reviewers expressed concern about the number of patients who were left out of the study because they died."
There is a huge misunderstanding in the summary about what is copyright (the art vs the images of the art), and the comments so far do poor job of explaining it, so I'll try. What the textbook maker does not want to pay for is licencing is photos of the works of art. If you wanted to take your own photo of any of these works of art you could (so long as the museum allowed photography), but without setting up, lighting or permission of the museum to use flash, a nice camera, or the proper angle your photo might look like shit. Especially on larger images in poorly lit churches with bars over the chapel in which a work of art is hung, getting your own photo is next to impossible. Museum and private collections take super high quality photos of their work and then licence out these images, using these fees to support the collection. Why they would charge $180 for a book which is essential just text I don't understand. No one out side of these classes will buy the book at $180 if it has no images, so why not just cut the blank spots, and have an all text textbook that has footnotes or side-notes with links to the art the text is talking about? You'd save a number of pages of space from the new layout, and you no longer have to pay for glossy photo pages, you could even make it a paper back and reduce the price to $50 or $60 and probably make the same overall profit off the book, if not more.
The book likely is authored by someone who works at the university. So they write the book with all the pictures. Publisher says "Pictures are real expensive we'll have to charge a ton." So they leave the pictures out, and require the students to buy the book anyhow.
You often find that the very worst textbooks are required by the teacher that wrote them (or they were written by the department head or so on).
The next Slashdot Idle story will be ready soon, but Fark users can beat the rush and see it early!
Required reading for internet skeptics
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.
Learn to love Alaska
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.
I've had classes require you bring a copy to class. No copy, no grade. You aren't "forced" to get the book any more than you are "forced" to take the class. "Forced" when talking about a class in an optional program is obviously not the "forced" of prison rape. You are "forced" in many cases because it's new this semester, there is nobody to buy/borrow from who isn't already in the class. It should be a requirement that all texts be in the library, but almost none of mine were, and the ones that were were checked out long before class started (often before the book selection was public, from students guessing what they'll need). I think they'd hold on to them, as the fees for late for a semester were below the costs of the book. Or maybe they'd sell it and just pay the replacement cost to the library. I don't know, I just know that I've never been able to use the library for access to a class text. 3 degrees and 10 or so total years of post-secondary education.
Learn to love Alaska
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.
Fraudulent claims of copyright requiring 'clearance' and (ab)use of gatekeepers to control access to public domain works, where no copyrights in the original works exist, is a common method of revenue raising that is well known and nothing new. "Copyfraud and Other Abuses of Intellectual Property Law" by Jason Mazzone attempts to address this and other abuses of so-called "intellectual property" law with suggestion of ways to reform the law. Very US-centric but an interesting read anyway.
(I am in no way affiliated with the author or publisher.)
Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
common to most other similar material found on the front of computer magazines, the images were accompanied by public domain type licensing documents. Or restrictive licenses in the case of software (in this case it was a giveaway version of Paint Shop Pro which was also on the disc, free on proviso that the user registered for a free key). As it's always useful to have such documents attached to an image either via linking from source or as meta information, I tend to avoid copyright issues either by citing the image source (hence to the attached license) or by creating my own image, by whatever means at my disposal.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
I don't think U.S. Constitution applies in Canada. In many countries copyright is not set up to promote anything. Besides, you're presuming a whole lot. Namely that the book authors and publisher were competent. As far as I'm concerned, they were stupid as shit, and that's all there's to it. For all I know they could have crowdsourced the pictures of all the art they needed. You know, for fame and such, and the book could have been collaboartively done, etc.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
5. Profit ...?
Perhaps it was just a small run book for one specific class at a specific school. So while the licensing fee for copyright clearance could be nominal, it might still be a lot of paperwork to be done, and a prohibitive cost for a book that might sell 60 copies a semester...
You're missing the point. Why publish a book with no photos? What is the fucking point?
Its worse, even the original publisher will now have to pay for the authorized use of controlled content items otherwise in the public domain. Uses will conflict, law suits will fly like flocks of birds on the wing and ultimately every thought, every word, every idea will be locked down tighter than Lady Guinevere's chastity belt. You so much as hum more than 3 notes in public and a duly appointed officer of the court will pull you up so hard and so fast, you'll need to check to if your feet are still in the shoes. The stupid is accelerating people. It was fine a hundred years ago when your stupid only meant you'd have to learn to walk without the toe on your left foot anymore... damn farm machinery. Your neighbor couldn't even hear you scream curses, nobody was disturbed. Things worked just fine in spite of the stupid, because the percentage of stupid per unit mass was low.
Flash forward a century and now I can pay some imbecile to go to Washington, to have another imbecile pass a law that will require people have to drive with their children glued to the roof. And they'll do it, sure as Gawd made little green apples these crazy fucks will try to pass this law, and if I throw enough money around it'll pass, and the Supreme Court will find it Constitutional. We now live in a time where you can make people do anything if you just throw money around. You can remove consciousness from future generations by making it pay per view. You can put all our rights in little jars and show them in a museum. You can even turn flesh and blood people into "Human Resource Assets". Makes you want to throw up just a little, doesn't it? I don't know any more where to get off this bus, but I want off. Either someone please steer this thing in a sane direction or let me off at the next stop thanks.
Have you guys seen the new art history book I wrote?
It's waaaaaay better than that Canadian book. I've embedded the pictures right in the book:
A Brief History Of Art
(Please send me $180 if you click on it)
Thanks!
Although, of course it devalues the textbook as well (IMO)... for no pictures or diagrams, the book should be less than $50 a pop.
Are you mad! An art appreciation book with no pictures... here let me frame this in a context you might better grasp. You go to an adult bookstore. You see a hot little DVD, the clerk says "Oh, great choice, this is so hot, that'll be $180." You say $180! How can this possibly be! Is it that good?" He assures you it is, so you put down your money, and go home, pop it in the player and every time someone is about to consummate the boom chicka wow wow, the image is replaced with the URL pointing you to a site where you can see people engaging in sexual acts. Now, tell me, how are you feeling? How much is that DVD worth? Would you say that DVD is now worth only $50? Would "Devalue" even be the first word that popped into your head?
This is education as rape. This is copyright gone bug fuck. This is student abuse in no uncertain terms and a dark cloud that threatens to extinguish education as we know it. What this is not is the devaluation of a text book. This is the devaluation of future society.
Err in light of the topic of the debate, THAT IS A GOOD THING.
It can't be a breach of contract. I didn't agree to anything when I paid them money for the ticket. I certainly didn't agree to have conditions imposed on me after the sale. (I can't see a ticket until I pay money for it...) That's like, "by opening this package, you agree to the terms of the license enclosed". No, no I don't! Especially if I can't see the license until I pay money.
Also, how are they really going to enforce "no commercial use"? Let's say I take a picture with their permission under the no commercial use. I then turn around and give (not sell) the copyright to that picture to someone else. They can then use that picture commercially because there is no agreement forcing me to force any future copyright owner to agree to the conditions.
I'm sure the same argument would apply in national parks and similar, except that they are generally run by people with access to guns and prisons and such. Still, if I'm in country B, and I then return to my original country A, there isn't much the authorities in country B can do to stop me selling my pictures or using them for advertising or whatever.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
But the problem is that the only available images of the original work in its current state are copyrighted.
Why not just throw in a free copy of this and refer to the page numbers!!?
Seriously, I can walk into any local bookshop and browse through any number of books with reproductions of famous artworks, most of which are pretty cheap. They could do worse than picking up a copy of "The Story of Art" by Gombrich.
Failing that, could they not take the position that Wikipedia do: 'The official position taken by the Wikimedia Foundation is that "faithful reproductions of two-dimensional public domain works of art are public domain, and that claims to the contrary represent an assault on the very concept of a public domain'?
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
You're wrong. It's NOT possible to copyright photographs of two-dimensional art. Copyright law only allows copyright on "original works of art". And photographs of text and pictures are not original. And there's not only the law (just about anywhere in the world, including the US and Canada) which doesn't give them copyright, but there are also court decisions support that.
This doesn't keep photographers from claiming copyright, but actually, what they're doing is FRAUD. And the people doing that book could have just ignored these fraudulent claims. There was no need at all to "clear copyrights", because there aren't any. And if the photographer is unhappy and sues -- tough luck, he's actually the criminal trying to defraud the public.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
You're only right for three-dimensional works of art. With two-dimensional ones, you're dead wrong. It's not possible to copyright a photograph, scan or photocopy of a picture or text, because it's lacking originality. Just read your copyright-law.
So anyone claiming copyright on a two-dimensional replication of a two-dimensional work he does not hold copyright on is simply trying to the DEFRAUD the copyright holder -- and if that work happens to be in the public domain, he's trying to defraud the public.
I'm totally baffled that so many here believe anyone can claim copyright on a photo of a public domain picture. Propaganda must have worked wonders. But it's just not what the law says. Not in Europe, not in the USA, not in Canada.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
It's actually fairly common to have enforcible contracts where some terms are not evident until after the parties have agreed to enter it. So long as there is an opportunity to exit the agreement after having had a chance to review the additional terms, with the parties being restored to their pre-contract conditions, then it's considered acceptable.
Of course, adhesive contracts is an area of law that is badly in need of strong consumer protection reforms, but good luck with that these days.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
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
http://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/100t7i/this_is_my_todays_newspaper/
http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/thumblarge_374/12368051426X3544.jpg
http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/thumblarge_374/12368051426X3544.jpg
A professor I knew who taught anatomy at the local medical school said they were using Grey's anatomy texts. Another professor, understandably shocked, asked "Aren't there any newer textbooks with color pictures of real anatomy they could use?" The first one replied that, yes, but they were copyrighted and generally couldn't be used for overheads without highway robbery, and the texts were expensive for the students. He said they would simply refuse to buy them, which wouldn't do well for the school's ranking.
I'm guessing the situation isn't quite the same between medical schools and (ahem) art schools. If your art students at your art school don't know art history, well, they can still find jobs in retail just as easily. Still, students there should try striking and seeing where that gets them. If no one takes the class and the school has a bunch of texts printed up and not bought, that's going to be an incentive to change in some way. If it's a required class, try not buying them and just google it or fake it.
"A professor I knew who taught anatomy at the local medical school said they were using Grey's anatomy texts."
Hardly. They would use the book from Henry Gray and not a script from a bad TV show.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray's_Anatomy
You are not allowed to make an identical painting. That would be punished as counterfeit.
You are indeed allowed to make an identical painting, so long as the original isn't under copyright protection and you don't try to pass it off as the original.
Make an exact copy of the Mona Lisa and sell it as a reproduction, legal.
Make an exact copy of a Rothenberg, punished for copyright infringement.
Make an exact copy of the Mona Lisa and sell it as the original, punished for fraud.
Free Martian Whores!