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.