Art, Images, Copyrights and the Public Domain

Eric Felten of the Wall Street Journal writes an interesting article entitled Who's Art is it Anyway? Felten reviews the case of a Wikipedia contributor. Wikiepedia being the on line collaborative encyclopedia where a volunteer contributor recently copied and posted over 3,000 images from London's National Portrait Gallery. The museum had its attorneys send a letter stating copyright infringement, while the Wikipedia contributors legal team responded there is no copyright on items in the public domain.

An interesting article/discussion follows. It is will worth the few minutes to read. You do come away with a better understanding of copyrights, Internet access across nations, and items in the public domain. Although the article concludes images of items in the public domain are not copyrighted, the intellectual debate is certainly interesting.

Felten states It’s not hard to understand the museum’s frustration. It goes to all the trouble and expense of making accurate photographic copies—getting the lighting just so, ensuring the magentas are distinguishable from the scarlets and crimsons—and then someone comes along with a few clicks of a mouse and appropriates thousands of images. One rightly chafes at the techie assumption that anything you can get your digital mitts on is free game. But no better is the opposite extreme, the effort to seize public property and put it under monopoly control. Copyright law tries to balance two social goods, providing private ownership of intellectual property to reward creativity while eventually making creative works as widely accessible as possible by letting the copyright lapse decades after the work’s author is dead. If new copyrights can be attached to old works of art, the whole copyright system is thrown out of whack.

Felten continues Copyright law exists for a purpose: to make creativity pay. Making accurate photographic copies of paintings is no doubt valuable and involves painstaking work. But it isn’t—and isn’t meant to be—creative. With all the digital assaults on the old copyright verities, the champions of intellectual property can’t afford to waste their energies trying to monopolize images that already properly belong to us all.

To read the full WSJ article, click HERE.