2.1 Copyright ownership in works of art and images  (Page 2/3)

The 1976 and 1998 copyright acts yield a few rules of thumb: any work of art made after 1978 is in copyright forthe life of the author plus seventy years; any work of art that was made before 1978 and never published is copyrighted for the life of the author plus seventy years; any work of art that was publishedbefore 1923 is in the public domain; and many works published between 1923 and 1978 remain in copyright today.

The complexity of U.S. copyright law, and its partial incommensurability with copyright law in other countries,is especially onerous for scholars who publish images of twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. Nevertheless, a gradually expandingdefinition in practice (rather than by law) of the "artistic work" that is protected by copyright has created analogous difficultiesfor scholars who study works of art that have long been in the public domain. Authorized photographers of those works, or theowners for whom they make them, usually claim copyright in those reproductions, with the same temporal extensions granted artistsand their heirs.

Thus, most museums now explicitly or implicitly claim copyright over images of all works in theircollection, whether in the public domain or not. The same copyright ownership is implied by for-profit collections of images of publicdomain works, in digital as well as traditional photographic forms. Such collections include stock image providers geared exclusivelyto commercial applications (such as Corbis , a company founded in 1989 by Bill Gates, which describes itself as a "visual solutionsprovider" of all manner of images, not limited to works of art) and image collections focused on reproductions of works of art forcommercial as well as scholarly applications (such as the Bridgeman Art Library and Art Resource , which present themselves as "archives" or "libraries" of art images, many of which are licensedto these providers by major museums as well as private collectors). For museums and other owners of art in the public domain, grantingnon-exclusive licenses to for-profit art image providers extends the commercial value of works of art in their collections.