Hacker News Reader

Comment by newaccount74 | Hacker News Reader

I have some experience with bringing museum exhibits online, and unfortunately this experience is total standard.

Museums think they own their artefacts, and they want to control who gets to "publish" them. Typically museums have a few archaeologists that they have close ties with who get the privilege of publishing stuff. If some random person comes along, god forbid from abroad, they will try everything to stop you from getting access to their collection.

They often don't even have time to publish their stuff, so many museums have unpublished objects in storage that noone knows about and they more or less keep secret because they want to decide who gets to publish them.

This fiefdom affects big and small museums alike.

One tactic that occasionally works is to get some important institution or some well connected professor to contact the director of the museum and sweet-talk to them to give you access.

View on HN

Interesting.

This jibes with stories my father told me about how he and his brothers found Indian burial sites and other Indian artifacts in upstate New York when he was a kid/teen. He must have found thousands of arrowheads over the years (tilled farmland brought them to the surface). I found a few walking the fields with him as a kid myself.

Anyhow he said the burial site was a major find and they knew it, and so they contacted the museum of Rochester or something, which came in much took ownership of everything, including all credit for the discovery, then hid the artifacts away, etc. He didn't have anything nice to say about his dealings with them, the experience majorly disappointed him, as he believed this stuff was meant for the public consumption but in the end was just hidden away.

Yep, I work in this area and museums/libraries often believe that they have the right to prevent you from using the creative works whose originals they physically hold. This is usually not the case. And in the vast majority of countries, digitizations of at least 2D works aren't able to be copyrighted.

Exactly. You can go into a museum, take a photo, and do with it whatever you want, legally, even though the museum usually claims that you need their permission to publish it.

The problem is of course that you can't take photos of stuff that isn't exhibited, so you need to get their permission to check out the stuff in the basement.

Europe actually does have a few countries that claim that photographing or digitizing a public domain work recopyrights it. They also have neighboring rights and database rights regimes on top of that.

If you wanna know more, you should look at the one time the National Portrait Gallery threatened to sue Wikimedia[0] for having an archive of uncopyrighted material. It went nowhere - primarily because the US has soundly and firmly rejected the nonsense that "sweat of the brow" creates copyright. Hell, even the EU doesn't think you can recopyright public domain works this way. But the UK-hosted NPG is still asserting primacy of UK law over the whole Internet to this day.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Portrait_Gallery_and_...

Many institutions in the UK and elsewhere claim this. But that doesn't make it true.

The threshold of originality is historically signficiantly higher throughout most of continental Europe than in the UK. The 2001 Infopaq case also has relevance in the UK. The UK IPO indicated that based on this decision (binding in the UK) and other factors these images likely shouldn't have copyright even in the UK.

The 2019 EU copyright directive also explicitly included the provision that 2D replicas are not eligible for any new copyright (Art. 14). This is not directly relevant in the UK (though previous CJEU decisions remain effective there), but it does apply throughout the EU.

In short, the NPG doesn't decide what UK law says. Many people have claimed that scans and reproductions are worth copyright but in the vast majority of cases this is legally incorrect.

aka nepotism

Reply on news.ycombinator.com