Righted Museum

A project apparently exploring how copyright claims result in selective censoring in the Street-View-esque images of museum collections produced by the Google Art Project.

The WaPo article actually conflates copyright and reproduction rights (I work in a museum curatorial dept. FYI) Copyright would apply to works where artists, or their estates, can still make copyright claims over their artworks (although the role of fair use in reproducing images of art is evolving: http://www.collegeart.org/fair-use/)

But why can older artworks that are now in the public domain still have their images blurred out? Although the museum may have agreed to openly release representations of the public domain works that they own, it is often the case that museums may temporarily hang works on loan from private collectors in their galleries. In cases like these, museums and the lenders work out loan terms that frequently include provisions about photography. These loan agreements supersede copyright issues. Whether or not museums should agree to such terms is, of course, a good question.