Maybe some of the museums need to have their fingers slapped as happened in http://www.eff.org/legal/ISP_liability/OPG_v_Diebold/
Ec
Fred Bauder wrote:
The law is not unclear, nor is the fact that it is considered ethical to seek to intimidate by adopting a posture which although it has little, or even no support in law, may yet succeed in influencing other's behavior.
Fred
On Jun 4, 2005, at 11:41 PM, 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).
So I do not think these are random museums breaking from tradition, or overeager law departments stretching to expand their control beyond current limits; perhaps the precedent here is unclear, or unclear to a significant subset of museums and their lawyers.