Technically, if your institution holds the copyright, you can license derivative works however you like (and cropping, resolution changes are technically derivations). BUT, I think it would be difficult to enforce resolution as a derivative work if you are putting both out on the web. I don't think it is a common practice--in my 5+ years of image acquisition experience, I have yet to come across it. Curious to be proven wrong, though!
If you're putting the images online, I would make it super clear that the low res ones are CC vs the high-res versions by putting the CC ones under a special section with a notice about "images you can use for these purposes for free with this credit" and maybe include a watermark or something like that. If it's just your institution distributing the images, maybe listing the resolution in the description line on the license would work. I'm wondering, though, if the CC attribution license could be used for all of them? That one requires your institution's name to be credited regardless. What I have seen is: -A museum providing a low-res scan free on the site, but charging a repro fee to scan hi-res. -Museums being allowed to use low-res versions or portions of copyrighted materials under fair use (though I don't rely on this approach myself--too iffy and I don't really think it's super defensible). Cheers, Shana On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 9:58 AM, Kate Blanch <kblanch at thewalters.org> wrote: > Hello MCN, > This may be a rather dense question regarding copyright law...but as it's > outside my area of expertise I figured this community could provide a great > reference point. My own research is not turning up an good answers/examples > either! > > Do any institutions assign different copyright statements to derivatives > of the same image, depending on that image's resolution? > > Take for example, a photo of a Greek urn in a museum collection. Would it > be common practice for a high-resolution TIFF of this photo to bear a > "(c)Museum Institution, 2014" statement, while a medium-resolution JPG of > the same photo would bear a "(c) Creative Commons License"? > > Does this scenario fit within basic copyright law or guidelines? > If anyone is differentiating copyright statements based on image > resolution, do you have this policy written/documented in a shareable way? > > Thanks for any feedback you might have! > > > Kate Blanch > Administrator, Museum Databases > kblanch at thewalters.org / 410.547.9000 ext. 266 > > The Walters Art Museum > 600 N. Charles Street, Baltimore MD 21201 > www.thewalters.org<http://www.thewalters.org/> > > > _______________________________________________ > You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer > Network (http://www.mcn.edu) > > To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu > > To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: > http://mcn.edu/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l > > The MCN-L archives can be found at: > http://mcn.edu/pipermail/mcn-l/ >
