The Metropolitan Museum of Art Makes 375,000 Images Available For Free (fortune.com)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced Tuesday that more than 375,000 of its "public-domain artworks" are now available for unrestricted use. "We have been working toward the goal of sharing our images with the public for a number of years," said Thomas P. Campbell, director and CEO of the Met, in a statement. "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." Fortune reports: The image collection covers photographs, paintings, and sculptures, among other works. Images now available for both scholarly and commercial purposes include Emanuel Leutze's famous painting Washington Crossing the Delaware; photographs by Walker Evans, Alfred Steiglitz, and Dorothea Lange; and even some Vincent van Gogh paintings. The Met has teamed up with Creative Commons, Wikimedia, Artstor, Digital Public Library of America, Art Resource, and Pinterest to host and maximize the reach of their enormous collection. There is also a public GitHub repository of the images.

Comments

Re:Root of the confusion

[hey!]

It's not the object that's copyrighted in any case, it's the expression.

Consider Ansel Adams famous photo of Half Dome at Yosemite. That was taken in 1960 and remains under copyright, but you're allowed to make your own photos of Half Dome, and because it's the same thing, they'll have quite a bit of similarity. But your photo is still yours.

Now imagine you went through a great deal of trouble to reproduce the Adams photo as exactly as possible, taking a picture from the same place at the same time of day with similar film (if you can find it) at the same phase and altitude of the moon. I'd argue then that you've actually violated the Adams copyright, even though you never at any point made a physical copy of a copyrighted image. It's because you've copied his creative expression.

By the same reasoning I believe the claims to copyright of simple photos of non-copyrighted paintings to be wrong. You are trying to reproduce the creative expression of the artist as closely as possible, and that is in the public domain. The situation is more complicated for three dimensional objects like sculptures or furniture where there are significant choices to be made about lighting and composition, but as long as you are producing a one-to-one reproduction (two dimensions to two dimensions, or three dimensions to three dimensions) I see insufficient creative input to stake any claim in the result.

Art museums I think routinely make over-broad claims of intellectual property in order to monetize as much of their investment as they can. As social problems go, though, it's hardly high on the list; that said this is a praiseworthy step by the Metropolitan Museum.