Great discussion. Thanks to everyone and to Patrick for bringing in another community's point of view to liven the conversation. First, Patrick, I'll point out that MCN for instance has a special interest group on Intellectual Property where people can gather to discuss these very issues. The museum community is I daresay deeply engaged in these ideas right now; and hardly in general agreement about a "solution" though we're coming closer to identifying the salient issues.
The most important thing I would add (since most points have already been made far better than I could make them) is that this conversation/debate is far from settled in the museum community - thus I would not believe anyone who makes a blanket statement about what the museum community as a whole does or plans to do with regard to access to images. Some museums are very restrictive for good and/or bad reasons - others are very open and there are currently hundreds of thousands of museum collection images freely available on the web provided by museums. The second reason museums can't be typecast is that museums are often portrayed in sister communities (such as academic community or in the recent federal "conference on fair use") as the outright owners and arbiters of their collections and all access and intellectual property rights. As was pointed out, this is often not true, not only with living artists, but donors an estates may as well apply contractual restrictions and museums simply cannot afford to pass on acquiring some of these objects (most of these are not plunder, but just contractually or legally restricted object). Museums are really in the middle of all this - we have some power in deciding access to some images, but for many of our collections we suffer as much as the scholar from restrictive interpretation of intellectual property law! I think Patrick makes some very good points which need to be brought up more often in the museum community too - such as just how much money can museums really make through licensing or charging direct fees for access? Beyond the legal problems; what are the real economic concerns here? Patrick posed a good question in asking, "how much do museums make from charging for access to images?" Museums (besides the Met) should evaluate just how much of their annual budget comes from rights and reproductions. Is this actually likely to grow in the digital era? How big is the global market for image licensing and is it expected to grow? Economic arguments need to be teased apart from legal and moral ones concerning access to images as the answers to each may be different. Anyway, there's a lot more that can be said, and I look forward to it. Thanks! Richard Rinehart ---------------- Information Systems Manager & Education Technology Specialist Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive @ University of California http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/ ---------------- & President, Museum Computer Network, http://www.mcn.edu/ >Greetings, > >I saw the announcement concerning the MCN conference (October 27-30, >1999: Philadelphia) on the Humanist list. I attended a conference of >scholars working in Ancient Near Eastern studies this past weekend in >Chicago and the general sentiment was that most scholars cannot make >useful images of texts and artifacts freely available due to >restrictions from museums and other repositories. Most of the texts in >question would be held on cuneiform tablets or papyri and could hardly >be considered to be of any commercial value for advertising (as opposed >to photos of a famous person). > >Since your organization obviously supports the use of technology by >museums I may be directing my question to the wrong group but I am >curious what reasons (if anyone knows) curators use to justify to >themselves (if no one else) prohibitions on freely distributing >scholarly quality photos of obviously non-commercial materials. I would >also appreciate any insight list members can give on the question of how >to go about changing policies that restrict such reproductions. > >Patrick > >-- >Patrick Durusau >Information Technology Services >Scholars Press >[email protected] >Manager, ITS Richard Rinehart ---------------- Information Systems Manager & Education Technology Specialist Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive @ University of California http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/ ---------------- & President, Museum Computer Network, http://www.mcn.edu/
