The fact is, you can purchase a $100M Picasso but you'll have no right to put an image of it on your website unless you pay extra to the Picasso Estate. Alongsi

The fact is, you can purchase a $100M Picasso but you'll have no right to put an image of it on your website unless you pay extra to the Picasso Estate. Alongside the reproduction rights discussed in the article, these two elements are so poorly understood that they seem universally exploited by rights holders, copyright agencies, artist's descendants and so on, all to the detriment of the public. Globally, there's a ~70 year gap [1] in the comprehensive digital representation of modern art, where work from artists who died <70 years ago is subject to such fees or legal obstacles that it often can't be shown online, even by the current owners or gatekeepers [2]. On related topics, museums continue to think some or all of the following: 1. Digital collections will prevent physical visitors from coming through the door. 2. Making digital collections freely available will lead to a plethora of badly made t-shirts, bags and prints that the museum gains no revenue from. 3. Digital collections offer a revenue stream that will save the museum from funding cuts. 4. Museums should divert resources to build their own collection systems and web platforms. 5. Our museum is so uniquely special that digital solutions used by others can be readily dismissed as irrelevant. Rights and digital issues combined mean the representation of art in the digital age remains a complete mess, and as we see in other media a void is filled by legally-questionable and often short-lived solutions. [1] https://www.wikiart.org/en/pablo-picasso https://www.wikiart.org/en/pablo-picasso (scroll to bottom) [2] https://webapps.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/explorer/index.php?qu=&Oop=OR&Fma=picasso&Fpp=&Fmt=&Fob=&Fds=&Fdst=AD&Fde=&Fdet=AD&Oaa=true&Oat=true&do=Search&size=10&dti=text https://webapps.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/explorer/index.php?qu=&...