The Metropolitan Museum of Art Makes 375,000 Images Available For Free (fortune.com) 42
The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced Tuesday that more than 375,000 of its "public-domain artworks" are now available for unrestricted use. "We have been working toward the goal of sharing our images with the public for a number of years," said Thomas P. Campbell, director and CEO of the Met, in a statement. "Our comprehensive and diverse museum collection spans 5,000 years of world culture and our core mission is to be open and accessible for all who wish to study and enjoy the works of art in our care." Fortune reports: The image collection covers photographs, paintings, and sculptures, among other works. Images now available for both scholarly and commercial purposes include Emanuel Leutze's famous painting Washington Crossing the Delaware; photographs by Walker Evans, Alfred Steiglitz, and Dorothea Lange; and even some Vincent van Gogh paintings. The Met has teamed up with Creative Commons, Wikimedia, Artstor, Digital Public Library of America, Art Resource, and Pinterest to host and maximize the reach of their enormous collection. There is also a public GitHub repository of the images.
What value in publicity for what you can't sell? (Score:3)
RIAA has some issues, no doubt, and some of the millions of songs that independent artists offer on Myspace are great. You said something very specific which doesn't make sense to me, though:
> Free publicity has value, if the RIAA, MPAA, etc, etc would all realize this
Exactly what do you imagine the value to be in publicity for a song they can't sell? The *purpose* of generating publicity around music is to sell the music. What benefit is there to a record company to produce music they can't sell?
Re: (Score:1)
> Exactly what do you imagine the value to be in publicity for a song they can't sell?
Make people come to the source, they represent the talent. It's sad that the way to find content is so distant from the actual creator of the 'product'. It's certainly not helping them when people use bittorrent, they could cut off that avenue by offering it themselves. As for the "can't sell' part. It's the old paradigm for instance of a drug dealer, they'll get you high for free a few times because they know in the long run it will pay off. I'm not saying give it all away for free but offerings to get pe
Finite room for celebrity endorsement (Score:2)
What is better, to make a little money or build a brand?
There is room for only so many "brands," or celebrities with the power to increase sales of a product by endorsing it, in a particular market.
Think of how many musicians crossover into movies
Ought these movies also to be produced to "build a brand"? Or in what way is a "money only/first strategy" appropriate for them and not for recorded music?
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe but the public is fickle and changes quickly
Even though it is "quickly" relative to other things, it still isn't "quickly" enough for each recording artist to make a living on endorsements. Only those at the very top of the industry have even the slightest chance of that.
Re:The real benefit (Score:2)
How long until... (Score:2)
...someone attempts to exert their copyright of "their pictures" of these "public domain artworks"?
But . . . but . . . but . . . (Score:3)
GitHub?!? (Score:2)
The write-up had me nodding in approval until the last sentence. How about we all repeat 200 times — lest some of us forget: binaries should never be placed under a textual revision-control system.
Re:GitHub?!? (Score:4, Informative)
there are no images at the github, only metadata
Re: (Score:2)
Wish, the write-up was more accurate... Thanks!
Re: (Score:3)
...binaries should never be placed under a textual revision-control system.
Why not? It's not like people will check out the image, modify it with Photoshop, and check it back in. Right? Uh, oh.
Dear lord! What have they done?!
Git Large File Storage (Score:3)
Git Large File Storage (LFS) [github.com]
Re: (Score:2)
The 215MB csv file in the GitHub repo is in fact stored with Git LFS. If you don't have the Git LFS extension installed, a git clone pulls only the 134 byte metadata file.
Metadata of metadata... it's meta all the way down!
Huh? (Score:2)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced Tuesday that more than 375,000 of its "public-domain artworks" are now available for unrestricted use.
Isn't that what "public domain" means already?
Re:Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
No, "public domain" means use of the works isn't legally restricted. It doesn't mean anyone actually has access to it.
There are no doubt films in studio archives that are no longer covered by copyright for one reason or other, but they have particular reason to dig them out and transcode them. And certainly there are many works in museums that predate copyright altogether that are not available to outsiders. If the museum staff takes a picture of a public domain picture, the resulting picture of a picture is probably at least claimed to by under copyright, so that does the public no good either.
Root of the confusion (Score:1)
Re:Root of the confusion (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not the object that's copyrighted in any case, it's the expression.
Consider Ansel Adams famous photo of Half Dome at Yosemite. That was taken in 1960 and remains under copyright, but you're allowed to make your own photos of Half Dome, and because it's the same thing, they'll have quite a bit of similarity. But your photo is still yours.
Now imagine you went through a great deal of trouble to reproduce the Adams photo as exactly as possible, taking a picture from the same place at the same time of day with similar film (if you can find it) at the same phase and altitude of the moon. I'd argue then that you've actually violated the Adams copyright, even though you never at any point made a physical copy of a copyrighted image. It's because you've copied his creative expression.
By the same reasoning I believe the claims to copyright of simple photos of non-copyrighted paintings to be wrong. You are trying to reproduce the creative expression of the artist as closely as possible, and that is in the public domain. The situation is more complicated for three dimensional objects like sculptures or furniture where there are significant choices to be made about lighting and composition, but as long as you are producing a one-to-one reproduction (two dimensions to two dimensions, or three dimensions to three dimensions) I see insufficient creative input to stake any claim in the result.
Art museums I think routinely make over-broad claims of intellectual property in order to monetize as much of their investment as they can. As social problems go, though, it's hardly high on the list; that said this is a praiseworthy step by the Metropolitan Museum.
Re: Root of the confusion (Score:1)
I'd argue then that you've actually violated the Adams copyright, even though you never at any point made a physical copy of a copyrighted image. It's because you've copied his creative expression.
Argue all you want, Half-Dome has changed since 1960 (and so has the moon), so you'd never get an exact reproduction.
Now you wouldn't want to infringe trademarks, and it might be pointless trouble(how many people want your photographs anyway?), but it!d be a devil of a lawsuit.
Re: (Score:2)
It wouldn't have to be exact, it would have to be close enough to be a clear attempt at copying.
Re: (Score:1)
The worst that I can see that being viewed as is plagiarism - and that would depend on whether or not you were trying to pass it off as entirely your own work. This type of activity is happening with increasing frequency in the photography world - photo used for an advert is a third-party reshoot of something that another photographer had posted online. There have been court cases, but because you can't copyright the concept then they have tended to be for things like loss of earnings, plagiarism, etc. Here
Re: (Score:2)
I think your argument is moot however, as copyright does not cover only "creative expression". It also requires the item be fixed (laid down to paper or some other medium) and original as well.
Re:Ain't nobody got time for that. (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
That's the big problem everybody has.
Re: (Score:2)
No, "public domain" means use of the works isn't legally restricted. It doesn't mean anyone actually has access to it.
So the "now available" is the only significant part of the statement; the "unrestricted use" is redundant. The way it was written is that the "unrestricted use" is the new part.
Lies, damned lies, and Slashdot headlines (Score:3)
Gee, that sounded so exciting. All this talk about images. If the editors had bothered to click the github link, they'd have seen this on the first page:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art provides select datasets of information on more than 420,000 artworks in its Collection for unrestricted commercial and noncommercial use. ...
Images not included
Images are not included and are not part of the dataset. Companion artworks listed in the dataset covered by the policy are identified in the Collection section of the Museum’s website with the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) icon.
It's metadata. No pictures. Hence the wikipedia links in the lame and misleading article.
Re:Lies, damned lies, and Slashdot headlines (Score:5, Informative)
I think you're meant to go through the website, and download the images from there. The photography looks to be high quality, and fairly high resolution-- though not spectacularly so.
For example:
The Death of Socrates [metmuseum.org]. Click on "download", and you'll receive a a 3811 × 2528 pixels JPEG.
Armor Garniture of George Clifford (1558–1605), Third Earl of Cumberland [metmuseum.org]. You can download a 1457 × 1861 JPEG.
As far as metadata is concerned-- the EXIF contains a link back to the catalog page. Camera specific metadata has been stripped.
Re: (Score:2)
I think you're meant to go through the website, and download the images from there. The photography looks to be high quality, and fairly high resolution-- though not spectacularly so.
Better than nothing, I suppose. So who's going to run the botnet to harvest all the images from the site and put together a proper torrent? Because this nickel and dime image-at-a-time thing is bullshit.
Re: (Score:2)
Meh (Score:1)
Meh
Hypocrites (Score:2)
link (Score:1)