Public domain art in an age of easier mechanical reproducibility

D-Lib Magazine

Volumn 11, Issue 11, 2005, Pages

  Hamma, Kenneth ^a  

^a GETTY CONSERVATION INSTITUTE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 27844490486     PISSN: 10829873     EISSN: 10829873     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1045/november2005-hamma     Document Type: Review

References (9)

1. Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit.
2. Paul Valéry, Pièces sur l'art, (Le conquête de l'ubiquité).
3. "What we have right now is an exponentially expanding intellectual land grab, a land grab that is not only bad but dumb, about which the progressive community is largely silent, the center overly sanguine, and the right wing short-sighted." James Boyle, Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society (1966).
4. BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY, LTD. v. COREL CORP., 36 F. Supp. 2d 191 (S.D.N.Y. 1999) 〈http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/36_FSupp2d_191.htm〉 and 〈http://www.panix.com/~squigle/rarin/corel2.html〉 which reveals a very interesting response from one part of the museum community.
5. While the revenue streams from image licensing hardly rise to the bar set by the merchandizing activities of the most ambitious of museum stores, which has been a point for questioning tax-exempt status, its impact on access and so on mission is arguably greater and might be more visible in discussions of nonprofit sector policy as, e.g., introductory chapter of Marion R. Fremont-Smith, Governing Nonprofit Organizations, 2004 (pp. 1-18).
6. The most recent study on this was commissioned by the Mellon Foundation and delivered by Simon Tanner for King's Digital Consultancy Services, Reproduction charging models and rights policy for digital images in American art museums, 2004, which pointed to 56 of 100 museums with budgets over $10 million receiving less than $50,000 annually from digital rights transactions. This study did not address the policy issue of this paper - except to ask museums if unauthorized use of images of public domain works constituted 'fair use' (p. 31) - but limited its conclusions to managing rights services, pricing structures and revenue.
7. Previous studies have tended to focus on the revenue potential of image licensing without regard to the status of the intellectual property in the underlying work. For example, The Marketing Works, Like Light Through a Prism: Analyzing Commercial Markets for Cultural Heritage Content, January 1999,
8. and Glen Bloom, An Analysis of Economic Models for Administering Museum Intellectual Property, March 1997, "In addition to serving their traditional role of making their collections available to the public, particularly by licensing their images, museums may be able to capitalize on the value of their collections..."
9. The Tanner report cited above notes, p. 35, "Everyone interviewed wants to recoup costs but almost none claimed to actually achieve or expected to achieve this." And "Even those services that claimed to recoup full costs generally did not account fully for salary costs or overhead expenses."