[Foundation-l] [Ticket#: 126217-FW] Emily Dickinson poems

Sun Jun 5 05:41:50 UTC 2005

At the second "Signal or Noise" conference, a museum curator stated
explicitly that many museums consider their images of their artwork to
be copyrightable and copyrighted; they sell postcards, posters, etc of
those images. They spend money curating the works of art, and
commissioning the photos, and want to be able to recoup that.  (I am
more or less repeating verbatim arguments I heard).

So I do not think these are random museums breaking from tradition, or
overeager law departments stretching to expand their control beyond
current limits; perhaps the precedent here is unclear, or unclear to a
significant subset of museums and their lawyers.

SJ

On 6/4/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Soufron wrote:
> >> Don't you folks feel like we're getting more and more stuff like this
> >> these days ?
> 
> Yes, I think we are.
> 
> The kind of case that I personally find most annoying are claims from
> museums where the art underlying the photo has clearly been in the
> public domain for a very long time.  If I get one more like that, I'm
> going to go on a rampage and make a lot of noise about it.
> 
> --Jimbo

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