The Met has released 375,000 images under the CC0 license: New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art releases 375,000 digital works for remix and re-use online via CC0 - Creative Commons
Pretty cool!
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This is awesome news! I’ve been working on a tutorial that uses one of the downloadable Met photographs of public domain paintings and I was a bit worried about the old license as it was very restrictive and also not very clear as to what usages were or weren’t allowed.
Here is hoping other Museums and such with restrictive licenses on faithful reproductions of public domain images will follow in the Met Museum’s footsteps.
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Changes in copyright laws over the last couple of generations have created a chilling effect on exchange of information. I read the old Met license several times over, trying to figure out if using the image as I wanted to use it was “OK”. Did my tutorial qualify as “scholarly”? Then yes, under the prior Met copyright I could use the image. But what if the use was commercial? Then no, can’t use it. Does showing an LCH blend mode qualify as analysis? Then that’s OK. Or was it modification to the image? Then that wasn’t OK. And so on.
On the other hand, creating truly high quality faithful reproductions of public doman images isn’t free, takes resources, time, training, equipment, storage space on a server, etc. So when an institution such as the Met does what they just did, that’s pretty awesome.
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