NUL Copyright
This blog is to share information and insight on copyright law, trends and practices and how they may affect the Northwestern University community.
May 4, 2008
Public domain art
Peter Hirtle offers an interesting commentary on the May 2 discussion hosted by the New York Bar Association, "Bridgeman and the Future of Public Domain Art."
If the copyright in a work of art has expired, that is, if the work is in the public domain, the museum that owns it can not exert control over its use by asserting copyright ownership. This is also true of works held in libraries and archives. Even if the work is still protected by copyright, it is not necessarily true that the owner of a copy, even if it is THE ONLY copy, also owns the copyrights. Unless they are also legally transferred, the physical item and the copyrights remain separate.
In 1999, Judge Kaplan of the Southern District of New York ruled that exact copies of art works do not qualify for separate copyright protection. This means that, even if a copy of a public domain work was produced with great difficulty or at great expense, unless it contains significant original elements (lighting, composition, etc.), its creator cannot claim copyright on it. The case, Bridgeman v. Corel, is one of the most important copyright decisions in recent years, but as Hirtle and others explain in their summaries, it hasn't really changed the landscape of art copying and art publishing all that much. It is still common practice for museums to restrict photographic access to their collections, and to charge fees and impose licensing terms on those it does allow to photograph.
We see the effect of this in our everyday work. The ARTstor database, for example, contains hundreds of thousands of images of some wonderful works of art. Northwestern pays a fee for our ARTstor subscription, and ARTstor has paid to license many of the images from the museums owning the originals. ARTstor, who co-sponsored the May 2 event, has struggled to convince the owners of these works of art to broaden licensing terms to allow subscribers to download copies of images at sizes large enough for decent classroom projection. As a result, the ARTstor database is often less useful than it should be.
by Claire Stewart | Events | TrackBack