0.4 Factors in providing fee-free images for scholarly publication  (Page 2/5)

Concern about the security of high-resolution files

Rights and licensing departments serve the museum’s core mission by promoting and publicizing collections through the dissemination of high-quality object photography. Historically they have also functioned as gatekeepers endeavoring to ensure that the museum’s object photography is appropriately credited and reproduced with a high fidelity to the original. They also direct their clients to seek permissions from third-party copyright holders. During the early days of digital imaging, museums feared that the distribution of high-resolution digital files would undermine their control of image use and result in misuse.

Increasingly, however, new technologies “are radically altering the ways in which information is disseminated.” Shyam Oberoi, “Doing the DAM: Digital Asset Management at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” American Society for Information Science and Technology Bulletin (April-May 2008), (External Link) . People can completely circumvent the museum in quickly obtaining object images without paying any fee. Anyone can use an inexpensive scanner to capture images from museum publications. Visitors to the museum photograph objects in galleries using digital cameras and cell phones, and students frequently start their picture research on Google Images, easily locating scores of museum object images.

However, the quality of these unauthorized images is inferior to those produced by the museum’s photography studio, and they also typically lack accurate, updated descriptive information about the object such as credit lines and copyright information. Today, many museums recognize that providing better access to high-resolution, carefully color-calibrated images and accompanying text written by their curators and educators is superior to the alternative—namely, having their collections poorly represented by images the public makes, or finds, on the web.

Exclusive versus non-exclusive image distribution

The 1989 launch of Bill Gates’s privately owned Interactive Home Systems, later to become Corbis Corporation, is almost legend. Gates believed a market would emerge for high-resolution images of works of art that could “hang” in private homes and be displayed through digital picture frames. Katie Hafner, "A Photo Trove, a Mounting Challenge,” New York Times, April 10, 2007, (External Link) . The company started approaching museums in the early 1990s with a proposition: Corbis would scan color transparencies of the masterpieces in the collection and provide duplicate files to the museum in exchange for the right to license the images. In those early days of digital technology, museums lacked the facilities to scan images internally, which made the proposal attractive. Yet no one could predict the long-term demand for images, let alone the monetary value of the right to reproduce them. Ultimately, several museums did partner with Corbis, but most agreed only to non-exclusive licensing arrangements.

The Corbis discussions left museums with the impression that digital images of objects in their collection—or at least of the masterpieces—were indeed valuable. After all, Bill Gates’s company was eager to obtain the license to distribute them. This new realm of licensing presented opportunities to museums; yet, as nonprofit entities, many institutions were wary of entering into agreements with a for-profit company—particularly one that might require an exclusive right to distribute images.