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Comment by abetusk | Hacker News Reader

Wow, really unfortunate these are locked under copyright of "The Trustees of the British Museum" ([1] for example).

[1] https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/image/1613716997

This doesn't seem like it should be true, even if they claim it.

" In 2019, the European Union adopted the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. Article 14 of the directive states that reproductions of works of visual art that are in the public domain cannot be subject to copyright or related rights, unless the reproduction is an original creative work "

and on the digitisation of those:

" UK Intellectual Property Office confirmed that digital reproductions of public domain images are not protected by copyright, arguing that "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 criterion, it seems unlikely that what is merely a retouched, digitised image of an older work can be considered as "original"." "

Presumably works from the early 19th C are out of copyright?

That said, I am all for supporting the BM- it is an amazing institution..

This gets into murky territory and I'm not sure claiming their pictures are in the public domain would hold up in court. This is common practice for museums so I suspect there's precedent in their copyright claims.

I would imagine that they would argue that providing digital artifacts in the form of high resolution images or other media (3d scans, say) constitutes enough of an alteration from the original work so as to fall under copyright.

If anyone has any more information on precedent, court cases or the like, I would like to see it.

Isn't higher resolution less of an alteration?

I'm unfamiliar with UK law, but it's unlikely that these faithful reproductions enjoy any protection in the US. Many American museums are simply engaged in wholesale copyfraud.

Bridgeman v. Corel, SDNY https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp2/...

Meshwerks v. Toyota, 10th circuit https://www.lexisnexis.com/community/casebrief/p/casebrief-m...

Very interesting!

The Bridgeman v. Corel looks to be a straight up case of taking pictures of public domain work and then trying to resell. It looks like the courts judged in favor of keeping it public domain, so that's great news.

In the case of Meshwerks v. Toyota, this is not so straight forward. From what I gather, Meshwerks was hired to 3d scan the body of a Toyota prototype car and then Meshwerks turned around and sued Toyota when Toyota used the 3d scan for something or other. The court ruled in favor of Toyota but the claim is that Meshwerks claim to copyright was invalid because the 3d scan was based on "... designs the automobile manufacturer produced, so they were not original works of art that could be copyrighted, and because there was no valid copyright, there could be no infringement."

So this is different from 3d scanning a piece of art, as the sculpture might fall under copyright, say. The Meshwerks v. Toyota was dismissed because, as I read it, engineering artifacts like the body of a Toyota are not considered art and therefor not copyrightable.

EDIT:

Looking at robin_reala's comment [1] linking to the UK's "sweat of the brow" doctrine [2], it looks like your take on copyfraud extends to museums in the UK as well. From the Wikipedia entry:

> In a copyright notice ... the UK Intellectual Property Office confirmed that digital reproductions of public domain images are not protected by copyright ...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24553116

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow#United_Kingd...

Not really, the copyright on the photograph will always belong to the photographer. The image is available under creative commons for non-commercial use, which seems fair enough.

Sadly, the images for non-commercial use appear to be restricted to a medium resolution with high JPEG compression artifacts [1].

As an example I downloaded the image https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/image/1613717051 (~1 MB, 2500x1973).

Still good enough for many use cases, but it limits personal prints.

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

Not necessarily. There has to be a “a significant expenditure of labour”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow#United_Kingd...

To be clear, you're saying that a public institution [1] who's charter is to provide access to artifacts that would otherwise normally be in the public domain and who's funding comes from donations and tax dollars should be expected to then copyright it's material when providing it digitally to the public?

Further, you're saying that artifacts plundered from colonialist rule should then be restricted to the people they've plundered from under restrictive licensing terms?

[1] https://www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/governance

you're saying that artifacts plundered from colonialist rule

Here we go...

ps. both my shallow dismissal and your OT flamebait are discouraged here, so let's call it even and move on

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> should be expected to then copyright it's material when providing it digitally to the public?

I'm saying they have the copyright.

In the Us at least that was decided based on the photographer having creative input on composition, etc. A pure scan of someone's artwork I don't think qualifies here.

Some other countries have more of a laboriousness based theory though.

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