Gareth Owen wrote:
Does anyone know the status of photos taken of works in museums/galleries (in this case, the Museum of Anthropology at UBC, Vancouver)
I think this is a very good question.
If the work is already in the public domain, then there should be no copyright problems with taking such a picture, although museum rules for photography would presumably come into play. If a museum forbids photography, and you take a picture anyway, then you've probably broken the (implicit?) contract for admission to the museum. But this is not, strictly speaking, a matter of copyright.
If the work is not in the public domain, then a photograph at web-resolution probably meets "fair use" as well as anything possibly could. I'm assuming here that you mean a photo that YOU take, of a potentially copyrighted subject. If a photographer takes a picture of the Mona Lisa, we can't assume that that *photograph* is in the public domain, even if the *Mona Lisa* is.
Here's a web essay about this issue -- we should probably find more: http://is.gseis.ucla.edu/impact/f95/Papers-projects/Papers/taylor.html
Most of the issues that have arisen in this area pertain to access to high-quality reproductions. That's not an issue that affects us much, since for our encyclopedic purposes, any old picture will pretty much do just fine.
--Jimbo