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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.
there are no images at the github, only metadata
...binaries should never be placed under a textual revision-control system.
Why not? It's not like people will check out the image, modify it with Photoshop, and check it back in. Right? Uh, oh.
Dear lord! What have they done?!
A dingo ate my sig...
No, "public domain" means use of the works isn't legally restricted. It doesn't mean anyone actually has access to it.
There are no doubt films in studio archives that are no longer covered by copyright for one reason or other, but they have particular reason to dig them out and transcode them. And certainly there are many works in museums that predate copyright altogether that are not available to outsiders. If the museum staff takes a picture of a public domain picture, the resulting picture of a picture is probably at least claimed to by under copyright, so that does the public no good either.
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Gee, that sounded so exciting. All this talk about images. If the editors had bothered to click the github link, they'd have seen this on the first page:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art provides select datasets of information on more than 420,000 artworks in its Collection for unrestricted commercial and noncommercial use. ...
Images not included
Images are not included and are not part of the dataset. Companion artworks listed in the dataset covered by the policy are identified in the Collection section of the Museum’s website with the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) icon.
It's metadata. No pictures. Hence the wikipedia links in the lame and misleading article.
I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious. --Albert Einstein
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.
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How will artists like Da Vinci, Renoir, Monet, Picasso ever live if they're unable to collect royalties for the free public display of their works. Won't someone think of teh children?
RIAA has some issues, no doubt, and some of the millions of songs that independent artists offer on Myspace are great. You said something very specific which doesn't make sense to me, though:
> Free publicity has value, if the RIAA, MPAA, etc, etc would all realize this
Exactly what do you imagine the value to be in publicity for a song they can't sell? The *purpose* of generating publicity around music is to sell the music. What benefit is there to a record company to produce music they can't sell?
Now I have things though I can incorporate into my works. I am against the concept of intellectual property in general but greater access to works that aren't under such restrictions is a start. Now we can also begin to determine what elements of current works are copyrightable and not already in the public domain. Similarity to a public domain item is defense against infringement due to similarity to a copyrighted object when the same similarity is at point.
Git Large File Storage (LFS)