At 07:35 1999-10-15 -0400, you wrote: > Are there any museums that can claim from such obscure (to the general >public) materials that they derive even one-tenth of one percent of their operating >budget from commercial licensing? I don't have access to museum budgets but am >willing to rely upon reports of such income by members of this list.
In a word: yes. <snip> >What I am suggesting that that museums should not make it possible >for scholars to obtain the sole images of objects which leads (IMHO) directly to the >sad situation Amalyah Keshet is now addressing. But for granting rights to only >selected scholars the museum would have copies of such items to offer itself and that >would (hopefully) have a very negative impact on the commercial CD-ROM product. No, if we agree to let scholars with very special equipment & lighting make unique photographs to which they will inherently have copyright, that's that. We have other images to offer, but not neccessarily ones which could replace these unique photographs - because we can't afford the very special equipment! >The other topic that I think should be addressed in this forum arises from the reply >of Richard Rinehart who suggested that museums are really caught in the middle of >this dicussion, <snip> Yes, they are, in that they are both owners/sellers and consumers/buyers. When pitting museums against scholars in these discussions, we forget that museums ARE scholars. Well, their curators are. They do research and original scholarly writing, and they have to order and pay for images, too, respect other scholars's copyrights, and perhaps also license images for use in a particular museum publication. Want figures? We recently paid out nearly $30,000 for copyright clearances for a major modern art catalogue. We're on both sides of the fence, which gives us a pretty good perspective on the issue. amalyah keshet head of visual resources, the israel museum, jerusalem board of directors, the museum computer network chair, mcn intellectual property special interest group [email protected]
