Tag Archives: Creative Commons

Smithsonian Open Access

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"The Death of Cleopatra" sculpture by Edmonia Lewis

Edmonia Lewis, The Death of Cleopatra, 1876, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC (artwork and digital image both in the public domain)

Smithsonian Open Access has arrived! Just this week the Smithsonian Institution released about 2.8 million images of objects in its collections with a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) designation, so you can now download them for free and use them however you want.

The Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (which together make up the new National Museum of Asian Art) have been making images from their collections available on their website since 2015. This week’s release expands coverage to the rest of the Smithsonian’s 20 branches, including the Cooper Hewitt, the National Museum of African Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

More information is available in the Smithsonian’s press release.

Open Access at the Cleveland Museum of Art

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Ma Lin, Scholar Reclining and Watching Rising Clouds, 1225-1275, Cleveland Museum of Art

Ma Lin, Scholar Reclining and Watching Rising Clouds, 1225-1275, Cleveland Museum of Art (artwork and digital image both in the public domain)

Another major American museum has joined the growing list of institutions to adopt an Open Access policy. The Cleveland Museum of Art announced this week that it is releasing about 30,000 images of works in its collection into the public domain, effective immediately. These images have been given a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) designation, which means you can use them for anything, without a fee or permission.

Art Institute of Chicago Images Are Now Open Access

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Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884-86, Art Institute of Chicago

Georges Seurat, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, 1884-86, Art Institute of Chicago (artwork and digital image both in the public domain)

Good news! The Art Institute of Chicago has launched both a new website and a new Open Access policy for more than 44,000 of the images you’ll find on it. Like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Walters Art Museum before it, the AIC has released its images into the public domain under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, which is the least restrictive kind you can use. This means that you are free to download and reuse these images for any purpose–even a commercial one–without having to pay a fee or seek any additional permission. As always, this only applies to the museum’s images of artworks which are themselves in the public domain, so most modern and contemporary art (including Picasso’s Old Guitarist and Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks) is excluded from the policy.

Metropolitan Museum of Art Waives Copyright

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Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bashi-Bazouk

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bashi-Bazouk, 1868-1869, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Image: CC0)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has dramatically expanded its commitment to Open Access. On Facebook Live this morning, Director and CEO Thomas P. Campbell announced that the Met would make 375,000 images of public domain artworks in its collection freely available for unrestricted use through its new Open Access Policy. This effectively supplants the Met’s earlier Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC) and Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) programs, which limited their scope to academic and non-commercial uses. The Met’s images may now be used freely for any purposes, including commercial ones. As always in questions of copyright, this policy applies only to images of artworks which are themselves in the public domain, so most modern and contemporary art is excluded.

Images that are covered by the Open Access Policy are marked on the Met’s website with a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) symbol, meaning that the Museum has waived copyright and dedicated these images to the public domain. Artstor, the Wikimedia Foundation, and Creative Commons–all of which partnered with the Met on this initiative–will also be making these images available on their own sites.

With this new policy, the Met becomes only the second American institution (after the Walters Art Museum) to adopt the generous CC0 designation for its images. It is by far the largest art museum yet to have embraced such a sweeping vision of open access.

Walters Art Museum Waives Copyright

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Fra Carnevale (?), Ideal City (detail), ca. 1480-1484, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore (artwork and digital image both in the public domain)

Fra Carnevale (?), Ideal City (detail), ca. 1480-1484, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore (artwork and digital image both in the public domain)

The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore–one of our Department’s CTPhD Program partners–was among the first museums to make images of many of the artworks in its collection freely available to the public way back in 2012. Ever since that time, you have been able to download high-resolution images of its works either on the museum’s own website or in Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons (CC BY-SA) license.

Now, the Walters has taken the unprecedented step of waiving copyright altogether and dedicating these images to the public domain (CC0). There are no longer any restrictions whatsoever on your use of these images. You don’t even have to say that they came from the Walters (although in general, crediting the source of an image is still considered a best practice whenever possible).

Note that this new policy does not apply to images of every artwork in the Walters’s collection. All of the images released into the public domain are of artworks that are themselves also in the public domain. If an artwork is copyrighted, the Walters does not have the authority to place images of it in the public domain. This means that most art made since about 1900 is still under copyright, so those images are not made available here. However, since the Walters focuses mainly on earlier periods, this restriction excludes a relatively small number of the works in its collection.

Images from the Museum of New Zealand

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John Gully, Milford Sound, 1883, watercolor, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington

John Gully, Milford Sound, 1883, watercolor, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington

The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington has made over 30,000 images of works from its collection available for free download. Over 14,000 of these are released under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license that requires attribution and prohibits any commercial use or the making of derivatives. The remaining 17,000 images have no known copyright restrictions, and are available for any use.

Te Papa is New Zealand’s national museum, and its collections include art as well as history, natural history, and Maori and Pacific cultures. You can read more about this image initiative on Te Papa’s blog, or begin exploring the Collections Online.