The Met Goes Public Domain With CC0, But It Shouldn't Have To

from the unfortunate-necessities dept

The ongoing digitization of the vast wealth of material sitting in museums and archives around the world is one of the greatest projects of the digital age — a full realization of the internet's ability to spread knowledge and culture to all. Or it would be, if it weren't for copyfraud: for every museum genuinely embracing open content and the public domain, there's another claiming copyright on public domain images and being backed up by terrible court rulings.

And so it's fantastic to see The Metropolitan Museum of Art joining the former camp with a new Open Access policy that is putting images of 375,000 works online with a CC0 public domain declaration. The Met actually partnered with Creative Commons, Wikimedia, Pinterest and others to help make this happen, and has even announced its first Wikimedian-in-residence who will head up the project to get these images into Wikimedia Commons and onto Wikipedia.

This is all great, but here's the annoying thing: it should be totally unnecessary. These are digitizations of public domain works, and there's no reasonable basis for granting them any copyright protection that would need to be divested with a CC0 mark in the first place. They are not creative transformative works, and in fact they are the opposite: attempts to capture the original as faithfully and accurately as possible, with no detectable changes in the transfer from one medium to another. It might take a lot of work, but sweat of the brow does not establish copyright, and allowing such images to be re-copyrighted (in some cases hundreds or even thousands of years after their original creation) would be pointless and disastrous.

Instead of the CC0 mark, the Met should be able to use a lesser-known Creative Commons tool: the Public Domain Mark, which indicates that something you are sharing is already in the public domain (whereas CC0 declares that you have rights in it, but are relinquishing them and releasing it to the public domain). And while the Met probably could have done so (and likely discussed this with CC since they were partners in this project), it's understandable why they decided not to: the statutory public domain is so damn weak and vulnerable that it can't be trusted, and a CC0 license is actually a much stronger way of ensuring nobody tries to exert control over these works in the future.

As Creative Commons points out on their information page for the Public Domain Mark, they don't recommend it for works where there is any doubt, in any jurisdiction, that they are in the public domain — a category that is virtually empty when all factors are considered. Though efforts to establish copyright on digitizations of PD works have mostly failed in the US, they have gained ground in Germany and the UK among other places. And attacks on the public domain are creative and frequent in the US too. Though it's somewhat hard to envision how another party could swoop in to attempt to take copyright control of the Met's digitizations, there would also be the possibility of the museum changing its stance in the future — and any such uncertainty creates a chilling effect where everyone who wants to make use of the images has to think twice. The CC0 mark is the strongest available statement that something is in the public domain.

Sadly, even CC0 is not completely waterproof, and it's a problem in the first place that the only way to release something into the public domain in most jurisdictions is via a third party's special licensing tools, not an official legal mechanism under copyright law. That's how you end up with a museum needing to partner with international copyright experts just to be able to make it absolutely clear that they don't own any rights to an unknown copyist's 100-year-old painting of a 4000-year-old Egyptian relief, which frankly should have been obvious. Kudos to the Met for doing everything it possibly could in a world that sometimes seems determined to snuff out as much of the public domain as it can.

Filed Under: cc0, creative commons, public domain
Companies: creative commons, metropolitan museum of art

MoMA Releases Data On 125,000 Art Works To The Public

from the good-for-them dept

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York is not just one of the most famous museums in the world, is also trying to give back to the public somewhat as well. Not only has it proudly embraced Creative Commons by displaying CC's own logo as a part of its collection, it has decided to release data on over 125,000 works into the public domain by posting them to Github using a cc0 public domain dedication.

Unfortunately, the data included does not include images of the artwork, which would have been a much more impressive move. Also, on the Github page, there is a list of "usage guidelines" which includes lines such as saying if you modify the dataset "you must make it clear that the resulting dataset has been modified by you." Of course, that's not actually required. Most of the other "guidelines" are more in the form of a request -- which is fine -- rather than a command. Of course, it's not even clear if the data in the dataset even could be covered by copyright, as most of it appears to be factual data (names of projects, dates, sizes, etc.) which would be akin to a phone book -- whose data are decidedly not covered by copyright.

So, yes, it's always great to see more people embracing the public domain, and it's unquestionably great that MoMA is releasing all this data in an easily accessible format without restrictions. But it could still go even further. Hopefully we'll soon reach an age when this kind of thing is just standard operating procedure, rather than it being considered a big thing to release some datasets to the public to use.

Filed Under: art, cc0, copyright, data, public domain
Companies: moma

Flickr Now Officially Supports Public Domain Dedications

from the very-nice-to-see dept

As we had noted in our story about Elon Musk declaring all SpaceX photos public domain, Flickr (where most of those photos were hosted) did not allow an official public domain dedication. And while it offered Creative Commons licenses, the CC0 public domain dedication was not among the options. Flickr is not the only site like that -- many sites that offer CC licensing don't include a CC0 option. Last week, there was an interesting piece by Jessamyn West exploring why it was that Flickr chose not to offer a public domain option. She found an old forum post by Flickr founder (and now Slack founder/CEO) Stewart Butterfield, where he explained the reasoning as such:

The reasons we don’t have a PD option: (i) Unlike CC licenses, you can’t take PD back — once it is done, it is done. I spec’d out a three stage confirmation (including typing out that you understand what it means) but this was seemed like too much and we didn’t want the support hassle. People are free to use the description field to specify their PD desires. (ii) There are liabilities that we don’t want to take on if we allow people to claim something is public domain without actual checking the chain of title — if they don’t own it in the first place, we can get in trouble. (This is also true of CC images, but at least that can be changed after the fact and there is less of a chance of the image just “escaping” in the wild.)

Of course, those reasons really don't make that much sense in reality. You can't really take back CC licenses either. The very first thing that Creative Commons tells potential licensors is that the licenses are not revocable. Once you grant a CC license, it stays that way.

Thankfully, the Yahoo folks who are currently running Flickr realized that this was an opportunity -- and have now announced that it has added both "public domain" listings and a CC0 dedication as options when uploading images:

We’ve been proud to support Creative Commons licenses since 2004, and we’ve become an important repository of U.S. Government works and historic images from galleries, libraries, archives, and museums around the world (check out The Flickr Commons for examples).

But we’ve heard from our community that we’re missing two important designations: Public Domain and Creative Commons 0 (CC0). Many members of our community want to be able to upload images that are no longer protected by copyright and correctly tag them as being in the Public Domain, or they want to release their copyright entirely under CC0.

So, starting today we’re happy to support these two new options. One of the first accounts on Flickr to change its designation was SpaceX, which has uploaded more than a hundred gorgeous images of its launches. These extraordinary photos are now available for others to freely use, enhance, and promulgate without restriction under copyright law.

This is a great move -- and we're thrilled to see Flickr take such a stand (even if it should have happened years ago). Hopefully other platforms will follow suit.

Filed Under: cc0, copyright, flickr, hosting services, licensing, photos, public domain
Companies: flickr, spacex, yahoo

Good To See: White House Will Now Make Some Federal Data Public Domain Worldwide Via Creative Commons CC0

from the good-move dept

As we've discussed plenty of times in the past, works created by the federal government here in the US are automatically in the public domain. There are some minor exceptions -- works created by others for the government can have copyright, and copyrights can be transferred to the US government. However, there's also one big exception, even if it's never really used: that public domain nature only applies to the US. Most other countries have concepts like crown copyright that allows government works to be covered by copyright -- and technically, works of the federal government that are public domain in the US can be considered covered by copyright elsewhere:

The prohibition on copyright protection for United States Government works is not intended to have any effect on protection of these works abroad. Works of the governments of most other countries are copyrighted. There are no valid policy reasons for denying such protection to United States Government works in foreign countries, or for precluding the Government from making licenses for the use of its works abroad.

In practice, the US government has never really enforced that foreign copyright. However, with the release of the administration's new Open Data Action Plan, the federal government is finally using CC0 declaration to waive copyright globally when it comes to datasets from certain government agencies. Additionally, the report itself is using the same CC0 dedication, while correctly noting that such a thing isn't even needed (nor could it really be used) for the work within the US:

As a work of the United States Government, this document is in the public domain within the United States. Additionally, the United States Government waives copyright and related rights in this work worldwide through the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

This is a step in the right direction. Historically, we've seen how making US government data completely free has helped industries grow and innovate.

Filed Under: cc0, copyright, creative commons, crown copyright, federal copyright, federal data, public domain