2009/3/31 Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com:
Hoi, The Romans and whoever in 1709 did not have photography nor did they have Internet. The practice of considering digital re-use is definitely a recent invention. Our current best practices were not in place until recently. The notion that this can be expected of our recent past is interesting to say the least it is not realistic.
It's the same legal concepts.
The notion that a commissioned work means a transfer of copyright is not necessarily right. This has been considered in court in several countries and this is not necessarily how it can be safely understood.
Commissioned works thing can be messy yes but that is nothing new. Superboy for example.
There are collections that have been given to museums and archives with the express understanding that the works would be preserved. Current best practice has it that part of such preservation is the digitisation and the publication on the Internet.
When we cooperate with museums and archives in this, we will find that it is extremely unlikely to get problems with their material.
That entirely misses the point.
There are all kinds of measures that can be taken to lessen the impact of an unlikely copyright holder to object. One of them is the release only in a low resolution.
Either a work is free in which case we go for the highest resolution possible or it is unfree and not our concern.
In some of the responses in this thread I find that people take a position where a museum or archive is the "opposition". This may be true for some museums or archives, but in this context we are talking about organisations that want to partner with us. They want to partner with us because we provide a platform that makes this material relevant again.
If it is unfree material making it relevant is a bit outside our mandate. There are many archives containing solidly free material that we do not yet have useful access to. Far better to focus on those.