Sj wrote:
At the second "Signal or Noise" conference, a museum curator stated explicitly that many museums consider their images of their artwork to be copyrightable and copyrighted; they sell postcards, posters, etc of those images. They spend money curating the works of art, and commissioning the photos, and want to be able to recoup that. (I am more or less repeating verbatim arguments I heard).
That much is true, if they are "creative works" rather than verbatim copies, which is the gray area.
Interestingly, not all museums follow the anti-information-dissemination route. All of Greece's national museums permit free photography without a permit to all visitors, with the caveat that no flash is permitted (to avoid either damaging the pieces or irritating visitors with incessant flashes).
This leads to the interesting situation where Greek artifacts in Greece are free to photograph, but Greek artifacts stolen by colonial UK and France demand further tribute to have photographs taken of them!
-Mark