Recently Boing Boing has been talking about copyright and museums that has also made its way to MCN-L. This just in today:
V&A Drops Reproduction Fees.
Boing Boing links to the Art News that was breaking the news. I went to the V&A site to try and cofirm the information (one would think this would be included in their Press Release section) and after about 15 minutes of searching have not turned up any smoking guns. Various policies on the site both confirm and deny this claim. The first hit when searching the site for “copyright” is about corsets (I know copyright can be restricting, but really…).
When I was doing digitzation workshops people would often express the concern about people “stealing” their images from the web. We’d then take a look at the incredibly un-intuitive and obscure methods for obtaining permission (usually ending in a multi-page form of legalese that would send an IP lawyer running, let alone a K-12 teacher wanting to make a handout for class).
Kudos to the V&A for instituting this policy. If you are listening, I’d love to see news of it made more prominent. Go and shout it from the rooftops.
The responses to the Boing Boing copyright conversation on MCN-L have been interesting. Talk amongst yourselves…
December 5th, 2006 11:48
A highly placed source at the V&A informs me that there were “a few rather sweeping journalistic statements” in this unauthorized announcement, which took them by surprise. The V&A is still working on its policy, which is not ready for prime time. An authorized announcement with real details will be forthcoming, and I’ll make sure to post it here.
One mistake I caught in the article was calling the V&A the first museum to offer a program of gratis scholarly licensing. The Met was the first, with its scholarly publishing program via ARTStor. The first, that is, outside of the informal (no journalists, no BoingBoing) scholarly publishing waiver policies that many museums have always had.
December 5th, 2006 02:45
Thanks Amalyah! Look forward to posting the official announcement here!
Is ARTStor the only way to get the Met images you mention? And if so is that really gratis, since you need to have a subscription to ARTStor?
Has anyone done a survey about Creative Commons usage that makes knowing about open scholarly use images easier?
December 6th, 2006 01:41
Richard: Yes, that’s the catch: since one has to be a subscriber to ARTStor, it isn’t really gratis. Neither, I suspect, will other programs be. There’s no free lunch, journalistic hyperbole notwithstanding. If a scholar is satisfied with self-service downloading of an available image, and that’s that, well, that’s that. But if, as has been our experience, scholarly requests require extensive research help, curatorial consultation, special scanning of obscure material, etc., they’re going to have to expect to pay for that. We have to cover costs and manpower, and they are not insignificant. The average scholarly request we get (at my museum) is far more complex and takes far longer to complete than the average commercial request, which is usually a breeze and often completed in minutes. We should, in effect, be charging scholarly requests more, not less. Any other service supplier would. So, apparently, we aren’t the greedy monsters certain sources make us out to be.
In short, let’s take these breathless news flashes for what they are: partial and usually misleading.
December 14th, 2006 12:18
Amalyah and Richard,
A brief clarification about the Met’s scholars’ license. It was not the Met’s intention to limit scholars’ license images to any one distributor–ARTstor was simply the first to deliver the back-end tools to support the self-service downloading and reporting that the museum wants from distributors of its high-resolution images. We feel quite certain that other distributors will emerge, not all of them subscription services.
In addition, ARTstor has actually developed processes to allow non-subscribers to access and download images in the “Images for Academic Publishing” system. Permissions will be administered by us. We’re pleased about this additional functionality, as we–and our users–were unhappy about limiting access to ARTstor subscribers.
Thanks, Amalyah, for giving the Met credit for being first. On the other hand, we are happy to concede that laurel to the V&A or anyone else who creates an effective way of streamlining the process and reducing the cost of images for scholars sooner, rather than later. For our part, delays on the Met side have kept the ARTstor-Met program from launching this Fall–we expect to be live early in the new year.
Susan
June 13th, 2011 10:43
[...] Esta iniciativa es sólo aplicable para su uso “en publicaciones académicas¨. De modo que, ¿qué es lo que se considera una publicación académica? ¿Pueden optar a ello publicaciones ajenas a las universidades y centros de investigación, pero firmadas por académicos? Sobre estas cuestiones puedes leer una interesante conversación en Musematic. [...]