What Hokusai’s Great Wave tells us about museums, copyright, online collections
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David Bull, a woodblock print maker in Tokyo, made his own reproduction in 2015 and explains some of the differences in his video series about the project.
This one's a summary, starting at 04:00: https://youtu.be/BizndSI4Nfc
Globally, there's a ~70 year gap [1] in the comprehensive digital representation of modern art, where work from artists who died <70 years ago is subject to such fees or legal obstacles that it often can't be shown online, even by the current owners or gatekeepers [2].
On related topics, museums continue to think some or all of the following:
1. Digital collections will prevent physical visitors from coming through the door.
2. Making digital collections freely available will lead to a plethora of badly made t-shirts, bags and prints that the museum gains no revenue from.
3. Digital collections offer a revenue stream that will save the museum from funding cuts.
4. Museums should divert resources to build their own collection systems and web platforms.
5. Our museum is so uniquely special that digital solutions used by others can be readily dismissed as irrelevant.
[1] https://www.wikiart.org/en/pablo-picasso (scroll to bottom) [2] https://webapps.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/explorer/index.php?qu=&...
In the US anyway, copyright requires a modicum of originality and creativity not present in a simple faithful digitization. Though the caselaw is perhaps murkier than might be ideal.
Originality and creativity are required in Europe too, but there's stacks of case law in the UK that framing, lighting, colour correction etc are sufficient to count as a work.
Are digitised copies of older images protected by copyright?
Simply creating a copy of an image won’t result in a new copyright in the new item. However, there is a degree of uncertainty regarding whether copyright can exist in digitised copies of older images for which copyright has expired. Some people argue that a new copyright may arise in such copies if specialist skills have been used to optimise detail, and/or the original image has been touched up to remove blemishes, stains or creases.
However, according to the Court of Justice of the European Union which has effect in UK law, copyright can only subsist in subject matter that is original in the sense that it is the author’s own ‘intellectual creation’. Given this criteria, it seems unlikely that what is merely a retouched, digitised image of an older work can be considered as ‘original’. This is because there will generally be minimal scope for a creator to exercise free and creative choices if their aim is simply to make a faithful reproduction of an existing work.
Interestingly, the most on-point case for the US, Bridgeman v. Corel, actually applied UK copyright law in addition to US law. This case's status as a non-binding district court decision is the source of much of the uncertainty on the US side of things, so obviously it's even less binding in the UK as a decision of a foreign court.
Identifying an original would be near impossible too, since popular ones would be copied or recarved. Does a second edition from the same shop count as an original?