“An image of art — a slide of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, for example — is an annoying bundle of problems when trying to sort out *what it is* and *who owns it*. The layers of ownership and claims of control over the use of images could make one weary.

“The work is in a museum (in this example, the Louvre, in Paris) open to the public; although the artwork is in the public domain (Leonardo da Vinci died in the 16th century), the museum claims property rights; the museum sells photographic reproductions of the work, but also allows anyone willing to pay a fee the right to make a photographic reproduction of the work; a scholar incorporates the image into her work (a scholarly book for which she receives no compensation) and uses her own photograph to illustrate the painting; the scholar’s work is published by a commercial publishing house; the scholar in negotiating the publication, signs away her copyright to the publication; finally, the publisher sells its interest to an electronic publisher who mounts the work on the Internet, making it available to users for a fee. Enter the college professor who wants to use the image in the scholars’ work to illustrate his course on Renaissance portraiture. Who holds the rights to our Mona Lisa? Who gets the royalty fee for allowing the use of Mona Lisa’s image? In purchasing the copyright to the publication, does the publisher also own the copyright to the images if the contract does not specify images? Where does the museum fit into this equation?”

The whole article is a head-spinner like that.

http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~csundt/copyweb/copyl.htm

My specific angle is to take a wait-and-see approach to how the winds of legal precedent blow. I think eventually that should be the primary deciding factor in our policy (per my comment over email).

Definitely a topic worth revisiting as the legal situation and/or our situation changes.

And just generally.

But feel free to jump in!

Thanks for the post. I’m not sure whether your comment was directed more at David’s comment or mine. I’ll be happy to respond if it’s the latter.

How about we say, you know, it may be shaky, may be not, but the library says all their images are copyrighted, see http://www.npg.org.uk/live/copyright.asp

So, how about we just be respectable about all this?

First, how about we first give the Library no cause to worry about the contexts of their images; that we give assurance that they will be contained in articles that are not subject to change by the minute, not subject vandalism or the control cranks and idealogues; that the images will be displayed alongside text that is responsible that has been approved as accurate by real-named subject experts.

Second, how about we give the Library some other basic assurances; that when their images are hosted at Citizendium, their documentation requests will be followed; that we’ll tag their material in a way they find acceptable; that we’ll place small attribution bylines in all image boxes, as they request.

Third, how about we then do another respectable thing. How about we just ask them for permission to use their images.

And fourth, since we have been so respectful thus far, and since we have a Policy on Media from Special Content Providers that we enforce, how about we just take the next natural step and negotiate a Memorandum of Understanding. Given our assurances to the Library, we get to use any digitized image in their collection. Call it block permission by agreement.

Fifth, how about we realize that this is what respectable organizations do, and that in return it earns you respect, and that respect like that is a priceless commodity for a publication that aspires to be credible and, well, worthy of respect.

Sixth, how about we realize that reputations spread; that reputation can be the up or down factor in funding, the up or down factor in garnering high quality human resources, and for reaching the level of worldwide usability and credibility to which Citizendium as a professional organizaton aspires.

Generally speaking, It seems that the winds of precedent are blowing against museums, etc putting restrictions on public domain works… but orgs with large public domain collections (esp. stock photography collections) are throwing a lot of arguments up and seeing what ‘sticks’. Corbis, particularly, is claiming copyright on the watermark they embed within their images. From our vantage point as an organization with few resources it makes it rather messy to accept such uploads…

Case law is odd. In the US, such works are almost certainly still public domain (Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp). In the UK, there’s one precedent and it’s from 1850; no-one really wants to open the can of worms.

With apologies to Schopenhauer, “a fruit fly can very well do what he wants, but cannot will what he wants.”