Hacker News Reader

Comment by est31 | Hacker News Reader

> are being made available for anyone to use for free under a Creative Commons 4.0 license.

I wonder why are they not public domain? IIRC if the image itself is public domain, a non-artistic picture of it is public domain as well because the act of making the picture isn't an act of art any more but an act of craftmanship.

View on HN

Museums really try to hold on to the 'copyright' on their reproduction, for example by claiming that the act of reproduction can be seen as creative, and not purely technical. See for example this response by the Van Gogh museum [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21671790

Some museums try to do that. It's not a very well-regarded practice.

It is strongly encouraged by the right wing governments cutting the museums' budgets.

I live in a left wing country and local museums will gladly make people pay a lot to get scans of drawings or photographs, 150 years old, of their ancestors. They have no right to gate keep peoples personal history.

Since my comment above is my most-downvoted ever, I'll expand.

Somehow the building, collection and staff must be paid for. The opposite of your "no right" position is that there's no requirement for them to keep your personal history; they could throw it out. (Neither situation is absolute: the museum probably does have a legal requirement to maintain its archives, and there's probably not a legal requirement for access to those archives to be completely free.)

I used to work for a museum, and for each collection they knew the cost to maintain it. Every item in collection X costs £1.50/year to "keep", for example. This varies a lot, a collection of rock samples might be cheap, a famous painting in a humidity-controlled room expensive.

If the government provides funding, that influences how much revenue the museum must collect -- it could be between £0 and £AlmostEverything. In Britain, general access (i.e. having a look) is often free in the government-funded museums, as is academic/research access, but they try and make some money on the gift shop and other access, like yours.

Since Britain elected right-wing governments, the funding was cut significantly, with instructions to the museums to fund themselves by charging for services that were previously free.

Example: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/mar/22/austerity-fo...

> I used to work for a museum, and for each collection they knew the cost to maintain it. Every item in collection X costs £1.50/year to "keep", for example. This varies a lot, a collection of rock samples might be cheap, a famous painting in a humidity-controlled room expensive.

Is this information available to the general public? Do museums ask for donations to help with the upkeep of their collections? With government funding being slashed to such an extent, I'm not sure what's stopping them from doing that.

They ask for donations from wealthy donors, the general public, and appropriate research institutions (government or private). They employ professional fundraisers and so on.

Wealthy donors like to have their name on the new/refurbished building or a single project ("digitize these portraits"), but donate a lot of money for that purpose.

Research institutions will fund things necessary for the project, but it's difficult to get funding to make general improvements or maintenance. That's not their purpose. "Digitize the 19th century British portraits" sounds like a project, "migrate that data we digitized to CDs in 2000 to a new database system" generally doesn't.

The general public donate small amounts -- e.g. an extra £1 on their exhibition ticket, or £10 in the collection box when they leave, or an annual membership for paid-for exhibitions. This money can be spent fairly freely, so it's more likely to be spent on everything else -- maintaining buildings, rooms, curating collections, digitizing things that don't fall into a nice digitization project, and so on. In Britain, for the museums that have been free for a long time (including the British Museum), it can be difficult to increase these donations ("I already paid in taxes").

I can't see a by-collection breakdown in the annual financial report of the British Museum, or my former employer. Perhaps it would need an FOI request.

If your museums and galleries are free to the public, like most are in the UK, it’s a reasonable part of the funding model

Don’t many museums run on donations and tax money?

Not all museums. Rijksmuseum[1], Finnish National Gallery via Europeana[2], Met Museum[3], National Museum Sweden[4], Minneapolis Institute of Art[5], The Walters Art Museum[6], Art Institute of Chicago[7], Cleveland Museum of Art[8], Paris Musées[9], The Smithsonian[10], and Birmingham Museums[11] all have CC0 art available.

[1] https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search?q=&f=1&p=1&ps=12&type=p...

[2] https://www.europeana.eu/portal/en/collections/art?f%5BDATA_...

[3] https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search#!/search?mat...

[4] https://www.nationalmuseum.se/en/samlingarna/fria-bilder

[5] https://collections.artsmia.org/

[6] https://art.thewalters.org/

[7] https://www.artic.edu/collection?q=test&is_public_domain=1&d...

[8] http://www.clevelandart.org/art/collection/search?only-open-...

[9] http://parismuseescollections.paris.fr/en/recherche/image-li...

[10] https://www.si.edu/search/collection-images?edan_q=landscape...

[11] http://dams.birminghammuseums.org.uk/asset-bank/action/viewD...

This really seems like a stretch. The creative part of a simple reproduction of a Van Gogh painting is the Van Gogh part, not the shutter speed of the camera used to take a picture of it, the choice of the ink and paper in the printer, etc..

And Van Gogh's copyright has expired.

> I wonder why are they not public domain?

Not all countries have the concept of public domain, meaning the authors don't have a legally defined way to give up all of their rights. CC0 is the usual license in these cases.

Don't know about UK though.

Yes, we have the concept of public domain here in the UK. Works typically enter the public domain 70 years after the death of the creator, however there are various exceptions.

I agree, and moreover, "non-commercial" usage excludes almost every practical use. I used to work in media and we found photographers have different understandings what this license means. Some were ok to use their photo for illustration purposes for example in our article, while others were offended that editorial is not non-commercial. We quickly made a rule to not touch anything non-commercial. So basically those photos cannot be normally re-published, since almost everyone has some commercial element included in their outlet, and then you are in the grey zone.

I don't know of any countries that don't have a concept of the public domain at all, but there are countries where authors can't put their works into it, which is a different question from whether it exists at all. I don't think Shakespeare's First Folio is in copyright in any country in the world, for example. Here in Argentina we did have a misguided attempt to impose a tax on the reproduction of public-domain works (the Canon Digital) which fortunately failed; it would have essentially outlawed Wikipedia.

> a non-artistic picture of it

I believe that precedent says that these are artistic images, partly because you wouldn't be able to make such high quality images yourself just pointing your camera in the museum. They set up lighting and things and that counts as art.

Because they wanted to disallow commercial use.

AFAIU this license allows commercial use, but requires attribution.

Commercial use is explicitly disallowed.

https://www.britishmuseum.org/terms-use/copyright-and-permis...

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

And they want to disallow that because.... ?

They can make money from it, and with their funding being cut by the government, they must try and find other sources of income.

"A spokeswoman for the [British] museum confirms to artnet News that it is facing “considerable” financial pressure from the reduction in real terms of grant-in-aid from government, with its public funding cut by 30 percent since 2010."

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/british-museum-bp-climate-...

> They can make money from it

Can they really? And if so, it's only at the cost of restricting access to culture, relatively to what's possible. Is it really the right thing to do?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com