45 ms·
British Museum makes 1.9M images available for free
- hk__2 7y agoFWIW most of these images are plain 2D reproductions of already-public-domain images on which the museum can’t claim any copyright.
- Symbiote 7y agoUnder British law they can claim copyright of the photograph.
- yarrel 7y agoOr so they claim. The legal arguments that museums rely on to assert this are ... really bad. I mean really bad. But taking on the combined might of the UK museum sector is not a good idea. So we have to pretend that a couple of irrelevant old judgements mean that "sweat of the brow copyright" isn't the nonsense it so plainly is.
- chrisseaton 7y agoIt'd be pretty tricky to photograph your own images that good! I'm not an expert but I believe that makes them 'artistic' in the eyes of the law, and so not copyrightable through precedent.
- jerven 7y agoEffort is not commonly enough to validly claim copyright. A creative spark is required. So it depends on how rule oriented the photographers worked. E.g. Straight scan of painting hard to defend. Photo of 3d sculpture with interesting background is easier. Usual exceptions are jurisdictions like the Netherlands and Belgium. Also not a lawyer.
- chrisseaton 7y ago> A creative spark is required. Right, and I'm pretty sure setting up a photography and lighting rig on a painting is enough in the UK to be a creative spark, under case law.
- hk__2 7y agoI don’t know for the UK, but under the US and French law this has nothing to do with creativity, and 2D reproduction don’t grant you any new right.
- chrisseaton 7y ago> I don’t know for the UK, but under the US and French law... Yes the idea that 2D reproductions don't grant new rights is indeed a Europeism, presumably from the French tradition and adopted into the US. The UK was sort of starting to adopt it as well before we left the EU. But the traditional view in the UK is that a photograph is a new copyrightable work. https://www.blakemorgan.co.uk/photographing-the-public-domain-eu-to-remove-copyright-protection-from-public-domain-art-images/ https://www.blakemorgan.co.uk/photographing-the-public-domai...
- kragen 7y agoUS copyright law derives from UK jurisprudence, not French, but US precedent has added a much greater requirement for originality, arguably starting with Feist.
- Cenk 7y agoLink to collection: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection
- est31 7y ago> are being made available for anyone to use for free under a Creative Commons 4.0 license. I wonder why are they not public domain? IIRC if the image itself is public domain, a non-artistic picture of it is public domain as well because the act of making the picture isn't an act of art any more but an act of craftmanship.
- Confiks 7y agoMuseums really try to hold on to the 'copyright' on their reproduction, for example by claiming that the act of reproduction can be seen as creative, and not purely technical. See for example this response by the Van Gogh museum [1]. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21671790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21671790
- zozbot234 7y agoSome museums try to do that. It's not a very well-regarded practice.
- Symbiote 7y agoIt is strongly encouraged by the right wing governments cutting the museums' budgets.
- teruakohatu 7y agoI live in a left wing country and local museums will gladly make people pay a lot to get scans of drawings or photographs, 150 years old, of their ancestors. They have no right to gate keep peoples personal history.
- Symbiote 7y agoSince my comment above is my most-downvoted ever, I'll expand. Somehow the building, collection and staff must be paid for. The opposite of your "no right" position is that there's no requirement for them to keep your personal history; they could throw it out. (Neither situation is absolute: the museum probably does have a legal requirement to maintain its archives, and there's probably not a legal requirement for access to those archives to be completely free.) I used to work for a museum, and for each collection they knew the cost to maintain it. Every item in collection X costs £1.50/year to "keep", for example. This varies a lot, a collection of rock samples might be cheap, a famous painting in a humidity-controlled room expensive. If the government provides funding, that influences how much revenue the museum must collect -- it could be between £0 and £AlmostEverything. In Britain, general access (i.e. having a look) is often free in the government-funded museums, as is academic/research access, but they try and make some money on the gift shop and other access, like yours. Since Britain elected right-wing governments, the funding was cut significantly, with instructions to the museums to fund themselves by charging for services that were previously free. Example: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/mar/22/austerity-forcing-arts-institutions-to-accept-gifts-from-billionaires https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/mar/22/austerity-fo...
- andrewshadura 7y agoImportant note: CC BY-NC-SA is a non-free license since it discriminates against fields of endeavour. https://www.britishmuseum.org/terms-use/copyright-and-permissions https://www.britishmuseum.org/terms-use/copyright-and-permis...
- smichel17 7y ago...which makes it really a shame when people use it, since it fragments the commons -- you can't combine it with CC-BY-SA content. For anyone considering, please just use by-sa. The share-alike requirement is probably enough to discourage the exploitative type of commercial use you probably want to avoid.
- pbhjpbhj 7y agoI think CC-BY-NC-SA is quite good: basically the NC means that if you want to make money from this content then you should share with the creators, or at least ask for extra permission, that's reasonable IMO. You can still share my content, just not make money by sharing it (unless you ask). Is that really bad?
- riazrizvi 7y agoYes. British people have already paid the lion's share of what is cost to produce these images, ie getting the artifacts cleaned and into a place where they can be easily photographed. We should be able to use it to generate revenue, since this is further taxed anyway. Seems like a wasted opportunity. Ironically many works of the British Library are out of copyright abroad, but remain in copyright within the UK.
- Teever 7y agoThat's a good question. Another good question is "Should the nation of Greece and the Greek people be allowed to profit off of pictures that the British Museum has taken of objects that are only in the British Museum because they were pillaged by British soldiers?" It seems really bad that a nation can invade many other nations and pillage their cultural pieces to squirrel them away in a museum and then dictate to the citizens of those nations what they can or can't do with pictures of the artifacts. The notion that the British Museum can tell Egyptian citizen what they can or can't do with photographs of the Rosetta Stone is pretty odious.
- guerrilla 7y agoI'd like to see an AI have a look at these and spit out what the average image looks like in this collection.
- tpmx 7y agoI've read so many of these announcements over the years. I always end up being disappointed. Lithmus test: 1. Is there a .torrent? 2. If not, is there a batch download mechanism? 3. Why not? IMHO: I think museum curators do it this way because they feel doing it more liberally would strip them of their power. (Also: why would anyone downvote this? I'm puzzled.)
- hk__2 7y agoFor me the most disappointing thing is the licence: they all use the NC clause which makes the licence non-free, and thus these images can’t be uploaded on Wikimedia Commons. Having a .torrent or a batch download mechanism is just a technical issue, which can be solved.
- kragen 7y agoProbably most of them can as long as US copyright law doesn't start permitting sweat-of-the-brow copyright.
- callamdelaney 7y agoWhat does US Copyright law have to do with it?
- epanchin 7y agoThere is nothing stopping you making a torrent. I’m not sure why you expect museum staff to spend their time catering to your niche needs.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- simonsarris 7y agoThis isn't new, the 1.9M were already up. It was one of my favorites and its in a list I keep of "High Quality Collections of Digitized Art and Archival Finds" (here: https://simonsarris.com/art-collections https://simonsarris.com/art-collections) What's truly new here is a detailed search function that works FAR better than the old one, which would sometimes have a warning/apology box that it didn't quite work!
- brigandish 7y agoThat's a really helpful list, thanks. There's also the Art Institute of Chicago's collection, which I found from another HN submission [1] recently. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18428614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18428614
- whitehouse3 7y agoLove your site! The link to British Museum has a typo: hhttps
- adelHBN 7y agoWhat's truly new here is that they are letting people downloand the stuff for free (some restrictions apply).
- willvarfar 7y agoWow your site is gorgeous! Its a shame some of your stuff is linked off to Medium. But I've just discovered your home build posts, and that's something that fascinates and inspires me too, so I have a to go now and read through all that stuff. Thx for real content!
- jahn716 7y agoYour comment in turn piqued my interest - very much enjoyed seeing Simeville and now having a great list of browsing material. Virtuous circle!
- sbr464 7y agoSample API query URL (undocumented) https://www.britishmuseum.org/api/_search?keyword[]=greek
- epanchin 7y agoI’m personally happy with the licence, which makes it easier for people to use without being pursued by Getty or similar as happens with public domain images. People here are complaining about it not being public domain, but as soon as image set is made public domain, HN posters complain about how Getty will abuse it. Can’t win!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- yarrel 7y agoThat doesn't make any sense. You can win, just don't claim things aren't in the public domain when they are. This includes you, Getty.
- wdb 7y agoThank you for posting this. I had missed this -- I am excited to improve Desktop Pictures collection with Egyptian, Roman and other beautiful artefacts
- clapsclaps 7y agoStill applying copyright to digitized versions of public domain works. That's NOT OK.
- Vaslo 7y agoI wonder when Getty Images will come claim them and then sue to Museum for $1M
- yarrel 7y agoHello rightswashing. Sticking an NC license on faithful reproductions of 2D images is a bit low.
- hn_check2 7y agoSerious question for HNers -- is this the biggest shithole on the Internet? Dang has gone to great lengths to ensure that only far-right anti-science, anti-intellectual noise sustains. If you want to deny AGW, the impact of COVID-19, hail the president, etc -- this is the place for you. I'll email Paul Graham about this. Does he realize how his baby has become such a shithole?
- jshevek 7y agoIf there is any evidence for your accusation, you should be able to link it. Do you have any?
- SimeVidas 7y agoAnimal Crossing QR code generator or it didn’t happen (joke)
- sbr464 7y agoRandom facts I found googling around: Site redesign completed by Numiko (agency) for £146,593. Uses drupal, elasticsearch on the backend. https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/digital-outcomes-and-specialists/opportunities/7179 https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/digital-outcom... https://twitter.com/numiko/status/1255102332704096264 https://twitter.com/numiko/status/1255102332704096264
- themodelplumber 7y agoAlmost 200K USD. That seems like quite a steal, almost a reverse heist. Amazing that the museum was able to work that out. I wonder about the size of the team, how tight the spec was, etc. It's been fun to search around...a very impressive collection for sure.
- sbr464 7y agoNear the bottom of the UK bid site is public Q&A with some interesting technical tidbits, such as integrating with a Magento web shop, etc.
- themodelplumber 7y agoYeah, that's pretty interesting for sure: > A previous project to replatform and rebuild the site that was aborted in early 2017, has yielded a significant amount of development work on the design, creating multiple assets including content models and front-end design that we would like to repurpose. > Earlier this year we conducted a new discovery phase to re-establish what we were setting out to achieve and this has culminated in a new vision and objectives for the website, high level requirements, user stories and technical options and recommendations. Phew. Reading that and trying to imagine the circumstances, I feel for those previous-platform people too.
- quickthrower2 7y agoMaybe there are some off the shelf elements to this. The search engine and back end integration is standard, so they only had to write the front end code.
- mellosouls 7y agoAs an aside, the excellent History of the World in 100 Objects is currently available for download. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nrtd2/episodes/downloads https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nrtd2/episodes/downloads
- ranko 7y agoFor context, this series of radio programmes is presented by a former director of the British Museum and features 100 objects from the collection of the museum (full list here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/about/british-museum-objects/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/ahistoryoftheworld/about/british-museum...). The objects range from the prehistoric (2 million years ago) to the modern (10 years ago).
- mellosouls 7y agoThanks, I was going to add this context, but my anti-procrastination app-blocker kicked me off before I could do so. :)
- adelHBN 7y agoThis article is misleading in one important aspect - the license for the use of the collection of British Museum in commercial settings. The article states that the collection of the British Museum can be downloaded for free under the Creative Commons license CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This international license permits the use of the subject licensed materials for commercial purposes. But a deeper look into the British Museum license proves that CC BY 4.0 is not applicable here. The Museum defines its license in specific terms (https://www.britishmuseum.org/terms-use/copyright-and-permissions https://www.britishmuseum.org/terms-use/copyright-and-permis...): the Museum's license specifically excludes commercial use in its license and even gives examples of sites and blogs that promote services, etc. So watch out! Don't rely on the Creative Commons license in this case. If you have a blog and you use one of their photos you may get in trouble. Go into the Museum's site and specifically read their license terms.
- Freak_NL 7y agoThe article correctly states that the images are licenced under one of the Creative Commons 4.0 licences, and correctly states that only non-commercial use is allowed in the third paragraph, but the author of that article mistakenly links to the CC BY 4.0 licence instead of the correct one. The British Museum webpage you link to specifies the licence as CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
- Freak_NL 7y agoIan has since corrected the link by the way.
- greyman 7y agoYes but it should be added that "only non-commercial use" excludes almost all practical usages. Even wikipedia doesn't allow to use non-commercial, since it's a legal minefield.
- ghaff 7y agoI'm a big fan of CC in general. And I can sort of get behind No Derivatives even though it goes against the "remix" idea that was some of the impetus for CC in the first place. (I actually learned the other week that even the FSF uses ND for media.) However, Non-Commercial is really bad. Yes, it encourages people to put their work into the commons with the knowledge that no one can legally profit off it. But it's essentially a feel-good license that lets people get warm and fuzzies for putting works into the commons even if, in practice, almost no one can use it. It's telling that CC spent literally years trying to define what NC meant and as far as I know never got to any sort of official definition.
- hannob 7y agoThis is actually an unfortunate, but common abuse of the Creative Commons licenses. Most of these objects are old enough to be in the public domain. Unless the photograph itself can be considered a work of art (which you may argue for 3D objects, but for simple replications of a 2D picture - hardly reasonable) a digital replication of them is in the public domain as well. Applying a "noncommercial" clause to a public domain image is trying to restrict freedoms that copyright law grants. The Creative Commons FAQ even mentions this case explicitly: https://creativecommons.org/faq/#may-i-apply-a-creative-commons-license-to-a-work-in-the-public-domain https://creativecommons.org/faq/#may-i-apply-a-creative-comm...
- CaptArmchair 7y agoCopyright law specifies that a photograph or a scanned copy becomes an original work of art if there's a discernible original creative element present. Copyright law doesn't define that creative element though. It's entirely subjective. And for good reason because copyright laws are intended to be universally applicable. Another legal principle is the principle of equality when applying a legal framework. A lot of discussion ends up halting in struggles over equal treatment. This can be avoided in the context of digitization of historical objects though. When a photographer is contracted or employed, part of the procurement process or the employment contract could include a waiver of photographer copyright. However, this is a policy choice, not a requirement. On 26 March 2019, the European Parliament adopted the Copyright in the Digital Market directive. Among all the upheaval about internet freedom, it also contains legal changes that make it more clear for member states on how to deal with cultural heritage in the public domain: https://pro.europeana.eu/post/copyright-reform-passed-by-european-parliament https://pro.europeana.eu/post/copyright-reform-passed-by-eur... Now, Article 14 sounds like it's banning the practice of acquiring revenue through copies of public domain works. However... it's - again - far more complicated: http://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2019/06/27/the-new-copyright-directive-article-14-or-when-the-public-domain-enters-the-new-copyright-directive/ http://copyrightblog.kluweriplaw.com/2019/06/27/the-new-copy... Ultimately, the hard part about copyright law is that it tries not to differentiate between specific formats and representations. And so, if copyright law bans the sale of reproductions of public domain works it would also, unintentionally, ban the sale of other reproductions: postcards, printed t-shirts, coffee mugs and so on: it would put a lot of souvenir shops out of business as well.