Doing the Right Thing
Did you know that today is the first annual World’s Fair Use Day?
We’ve been toiling over an ongoing project to better identify the rights status of objects in our online collection, so with World’s Fair Use Day it seemed like an appropriate week to start blogging about these significant changes and launch this project into the wild.
Starting today, each object on the Museum’s collections pages will have information on its rights status, including those that are understood to be under no known copyright. Also included is information to clarify what we mean by a certain rights type and, importantly, links to further information about copyright. We are asking members of our community to comment and e-mail if they can provide more information about artists, corrections if they think we’ve gotten it wrong, and generally participating in our ongoing efforts. The addition of this information will be a starting point for dialog that we hope will lead to clearer, more useful rights information in our collection online.
Images that are licensed Creative Commons or are “no known copyright restrictions” can now be queried from the advanced search on our website. All rights types are integrated into the Brooklyn Museum API, providing greater flexibility in getting to this new data. Lastly, we’ve taken one more baby step in the ongoing direction of opening up more content—with images and text that we own the copyright to, we’ve changed our default Creative Commons license on the site from a CC-BY-NC-ND to a CC-BY-NC, to allow for greater re-use of materials.
Over the next few days, we’ve got some blog posts coming about the specifics—stay tuned for posts from from Deborah Wythe, Head of Digital Collections and Services and Arlene Yu, an intern working with her. Please be sure to read the whole series if this subject interests you.
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Eastern Parkway/Brooklyn Museum
January 12th, 2010 at 4:40 pm
Hip hip hooray. What great work you guys are doing!!
January 12th, 2010 at 4:40 pm
BRAVO!
And thanks for linking to the WFUD. As a side note of the shameless plug type, the graphic for that is designed by Neil Numberman, a great illustrator and kid’s book guy.
January 12th, 2010 at 4:50 pm
Nice work you guys. Let’s hope this gets the ball rolling for other institutions.
January 12th, 2010 at 4:59 pm
Well done Brooklyn Museum
This is great news. I know how complex and hard this type of work is to achieve, so it is great that you are tackling rights in this way. Awesome!
January 12th, 2010 at 5:51 pm
Awesome! Great work (though the term ‘work’ is probably an understatement.)
January 13th, 2010 at 10:30 am
Hey everyone - many thanks for your support of this project. Deb Wythe just started blogging about the specifics, of which, there are many! Should be a really interesting series of posts and hope you will stay tuned!
January 13th, 2010 at 11:11 am
Well done, indeed! We’re heading in the same direction (yes, it’s a LOT of work, and insanely complicated) but you and the Brooklyn Museum deserve a lot of credit for doing this first, and really well.
Amalyah Keshet
Head of Image Resources & Copyright Management
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Chair, MCN IP SIG
January 13th, 2010 at 11:11 am
[…] of World’s Fair Use Day, the Brooklyn Museum now includes much more rights-status information in its online collection and […]
January 14th, 2010 at 8:38 am
Just curious: why not CC-BY or CC-BY-SA instead of CC-BY-NC? (In other words, what is the purpose of setting the default to restrict commercial reuse?)
January 14th, 2010 at 10:36 am
Hi Karl,
This is a really good question and it’s something we talked about in depth internally. At the end of the day, the museum is a non-commercial entity and as such, we don’t feel comfortable (yet) with allowing for blanket commercial use in cases where we own the copyright to the image. In some ways this is a shame, but in other ways we still have to consider that image licensing is something that we generate revenue from and that’s not a revenue stream we are comfortable giving up just yet. I say “yet” because since 2004 we had a default CC-BY-NC-ND on our site and have just now gone one more step in the direction of opening up content to a CC-BY-NC. Six years ago, we couldn’t stomach the idea of derivatives, but since then we’ve had a very good experience online with artists wanting to use our images for mashups of their own and we recognize that folks need to be able to crop and manipulate images for their own site design and reuse. The great thing about CC is the modular structure, so we’ve been able to allow for greater re-use while still respecting the current concerns that we consider important. That may change one day and CC makes it really easy for us to do so!
January 25th, 2010 at 2:30 pm
Shelley, thanks for your thoughtful reply.
One way to look at it is that allowing commercial use allows people to create monetary value around your work in a decentralized way, and some of that value finds its way back to you. When people have to ask permission first, that vastly cuts down on the number of people who make any commercial use at all, so getting 100% of the remaining commercial use may not be as valuable as getting a smaller percentage of a much wider pool.
Of course, that sounds very hand-wavy. For some actual data, see http://questioncopyright.org/sita_distribution , which describes what happened when one particular artist decided to permit commercial use. (Of course, she’s an individual artist, not a museum, so the comparison will be inexact, but it at least shows that permitting commercial use can still lead to economic value for the licensor.)
There’s also something to be said for helping artists generally, by allowing them to derive commercial value from reusing/remixing existing works, of course!
It’s precisely because the museum is non-commercial that it is in a good position to allow others to make commercial use. It would make much more sense to restrict commercial use if the museum itself were a commercial entity; given that it’s not, any restriction on reuse in some sense contradicts the museum’s mission.
I’m sure much of this came up during your internal discussions, of course, and I wouldn’t expect major policy changes to come from a blog comment thread. I’m just trying to throw some ideas out there for the next time you’re considering the policy.
Best,
-Karl
January 25th, 2010 at 2:31 pm
Whups, the auto-linkifier mistakenly included the comma in the link above… hope some editor can fix that.
March 11th, 2010 at 3:26 pm
[…] He went on to create 92 iconic covers during the 1960s that were exhibited at MoMA and added to the permanent collection. Unfortunately only five of the covers have their image rights cleared to display online. Not many people realize that even if a work is “owned” by the museum, the rights to display it online is another matter. This is an issue the Brooklyn Museum has addressed nicely on their blog. […]