Copyright is complicated. What’s protected? What’s not? And it’s even more complicated for art, where the work may not be dated and there are questions about whether it was “published” and what “publication” means. And it’s a legal matter, which is enough to make anyone a bit fearful about making a mistake.
On the other side of the coin, there’s a huge community hungry for images that they can use for a million different projects – websites, blogs, school papers, art projects, mashups. They’re willing to pay attention to whether an image is in the public domain or not, but they don’t always understand what that means, and the institutions with the images rarely provide useful guidance (see paragraph 1).
My book shelf: I’ve been doing a LOT of reading, both books and on line.
Over the past several months, Brooklyn Museum staff members have been wrestling with this problem. We respect artists’ rights and are working on contacting artists and their estates for our entire Contemporary Art collection. (Arlene Yu will talk about that more in a later blog post.) We also want to be as open and transparent as possible with our community about the images we provide on our website.
Our first decision was to provide at least thumbnail images of all art works on our website, as allowed under the fair use exemption in copyright law, and to include an explanatory “why is this image so small” for objects under copyright. The next step was to provide more information on everything else. Is the work in the public domain (“no known copyright restrictions”) or protected by copyright? Is it a three-dimensional work, where the Museum holds copyright to our images but not the work? Are rights to the work controlled by a licensing agency?
In order to accomplish this, we needed to sort through the entire collection database and assign rights types, no small task. Is the work two dimensional or three dimensional? When was the work created? With the categories established, we’re now ready to start sharing our work with our community. We ended up simplifying things greatly, lumping all “under copyright” and “could be under copyright, depending” objects together. If you have the time to do deeper research and the legal expertise to analyze what you find, you may well identify works that are already in the public domain. We’d rather err on the side of artists rights than the opposite.
Now that we’ve included all of this information on the collections pages, I’m hoping that members of our community will jump in and help with the project, just like they have on Flickr Commons. If you have more information about our artists (are you one of them?) — get in touch! If you think we’ve gotten something wrong, let us know and we’ll fix it. This is all a starting point, not legal opinion, that we hope will lead to clearer, more useful rights information.
I’ll be providing more detailed information about the project in future blog postings. Stay tuned for a post on our guidelines and I’m thinking about digging into the publication history of some works in the collection to show what it really takes to declare something “public domain.” Let me know if there are topics you’d like to hear about (keeping in mind that I am very definitely NOT a lawyer). We hope that you’ll find this work in progress both interesting and a step in the right direction.
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Thanks for sharing your creative approaches to these important issues.
This must have been a huge amount of work! Is there something automated in place that upgrades copyright status as works become releasedfrom their copyright period or will you have to be constantly upgrading things yearly?
Thanks for understanding! Yes, I spent a lot of time crunching our collections database (TMS) to assign rights types and a lot of time on the Web looking up artist dates when we didn’t have them. Our focus so far has been identifying rights types for everything and starting to clear the ones that are clearly under copyright. Now that we’ve gotten there, we can start thinking about down the road.
TMS doesn’t have a built in capability to let us automate annual changes, particularly since many works of art are undated and there is the issue of whether they’ve been published or not. At the very least, we could create object packages as we identify the cut off dates for individual works (“out_of_copyright_2012), and call that up and update the rights types as a batch each year. Not elegant, but probably effective.
Deb
Deborah
Thanks for this so far. We are attempting to undertake a similar project ourselves. How many works of art in total were included in this project, how long did it take and with how many staff was it undertaken, and further what was the cost of the project. Also we too use TMS, and note how you have used it. Did you ever consider purchasing any other image database management software, was it a case of trying not to over-complicate things and sticking with TMS alone, or was it a cost issue?
Crikey, that’s a thorough interrogation – I do apologise but it will help us focus our efforts this side of the pond if we can your thought processes?
Copyright is the bane of civilization. Its destroying us from the inside out.
Hi Mark,
Well, it was a big job. We went through the entire TMS database, which is tens of thousands of records. It’s hard to say how long it took, since I’ve been doing this along with the rest of my Digital Lab tasks for a while — pretty intensively since September. Staff is me and a rotating group of interns, plus folks on the Tech side for the website, and in the Registrar’s office when we need to do batch updates to TMS.
We do have a DAM (Luna), which provides images and metadata to the website, along with TMS. (Check out my earlier posts on that project). TMS is the logical place for rights information on the art collection. The images are all by us, so we can define their use as we like within the constraints of the underlying art copyright; there are fields in Luna for image credit, along with the object rights information pulled from TMS.
So the answer is: yes, you can do this on a shoestring. Don’t get hung up on what a big and complicated job it is: just get in there and start chipping away!
Es muy interesante todo lo vertido en este post. Ya te agregué a mi lector de feeds RSS, sigue así