The Brooklyn Museum and Copyright
With the recent release of Bill C-32 in Canada, (also known as Canada’s Copyright Reform Bill), copyright, especially in relation to information distributed and shared on the internet, is becoming a point of contention. I know that when I decided to start this blog, I was concerned about copyright issues, especially when it came to images. This is why the Brooklyn Museum and the way that they have approached their image collection and copyright is so interesting.
As shown on the Creative Commons Website, the Brooklyn Museum has undergone a huge initiative to define copyright status on all of their images. When you visit their image collection, the copyright of each image is described and restrictions around using each image is detailed. It took staff at the Brooklyn Museum almost two years to complete this. (for an example, check out this image by Charles Hinman, and particularly the rights section)
Overall, the Brooklyn Museum has licensed their image collection under a Creative Commons attribution, non-commercial license, which allows users to share and remix the images as long as the Brooklyn Museum and the artist is acknowledged and the work is not used for commercial purposes.
For more information about the Brooklyn Museum and copyright, check out these articles:
http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/20496
Interview with the Brooklyn Museum on the Creative Commons Blog.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jonathan-melber/the-brooklyn-museums-copy_b_430966.html
An article about the project in the Huffington Post by Jonathan Melber
http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/community/blogosphere/bloggers/tag/copyright?order=asc
A link to the Brooklyn Museum blogs, showing entries that pertain to copyright.
