On February 7, 2017, The Metropolitan Museum of Art implemented a new policy known as Open Access, which makes images of artworks it believes to be in the public domain widely and freely available for unrestricted use, and at no cost, in accordance with the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) designation and the Terms and Conditions of this website.
To request images for artworks under copyright or other restrictions, or to request an image not available on our website, please use the following form to contact the Museum's image-licensing partner, Art Resource:
Image Request Form
Download File ☆ https://t.co/otnWbs6X2c
Digital images of selected works of art from the Museum's collection may be licensed by educational institutions for study and presentation purposes from Scholars Resource. These images may be used for educational purposes only and may not be published or reproduced.
The images of artworks the Museum believes to be in the public domain, those to which it waives any copyright it might have, and our select collection data are also available on the websites of our distribution partners, including ITHAKA-Artstor and its companion service, Shared Shelf Commons; the Digital Public Library of America; Google Cultural Institute; Pinterest; and the Wikimedia communities. Learn more about The Metropolitan Museum of Art's GLAM-Wiki Projects on Wikipedia.
Finding free stock images for commercial use for your website or for your next giveaway can be a pain. Just running a quick search for free stock photos, or royalty-free photos will bring you to tons of deceptive websites that require payment to download any of their images. We've done the dirty work for you and compiled this resource of 20 different sites so you can get free stock images that fall under the Creative Commons Zero license or similar; meaning you can copy, modify, and use any photo you find, even for commercial purposes, without having to ask permission or provide attribution.
This is often problematic, if the artwork is not the primary content of the image or is not clearly recognizable: in that case, usually only the creator of the resulting picture (recording, etc.) holds a copyright. For instance, when taking a photograph of a group of people in a museum, the photo may also show some paintings on the walls. In that case the copyright of those paintings does not have to be taken into account. The distinction however is not very clear. The Commons:De minimis policy has more information about this concept.
Commons accepts material that is in the public domain, that is, documents allowed by the above exception, or that are not eligible to copyright, or for which the copyright has expired. But the "public domain" is complicated; copyright laws vary between countries, and thus a work may be in the public domain in one country, but still be copyrighted in another country. There are international treaties such as the Berne Convention that set some minimum standards, but individual countries are free to go beyond these minimums. A general rule of thumb is that if the creator of a work has been deceased for more than 70 years, their works are in the public domain in the country the creator was a citizen of and in the country where the work was first published. If the work is anonymous or a collaborative work (e.g. an encyclopedia), it is typically in the public domain 70 years after the date of the first publication. If the author is unknown after an extensive search, a work may be presumed to be in the public domain 120 years after creation (see PD-old-assumed for more details).
Commons is an international project, but its servers are located in the U.S., and its content should be maximally reusable. Uploads of non-U.S. works are normally allowed only if the work is either in the public domain or covered by a valid free license in both the U.S. and the country of origin of the work. The "country of origin" of a work is generally the country where the work was first published.[1]
The Creative Commons Public Domain 1.0 mark (PDM) is often applied to images on photography websites such as Flickr.com, and is not a license. Despite this, the community found that when a user applies PDM to their own work, they are releasing their work to be in the public domain, and these works are believed to be freely licensed. For further information, see Accept files published by the copyright holder with a Public Domain Mark.
Our extensive library features carefully curated medical visuals, perfect for creating compelling educational aids and enriching your research work. All our resources are freely available for your use, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (click here for citation guidelines).
The answers to these questions turned out a little bit more complex than what our enquirers imagined. Why? Because the questions above are not just about artworks: they are all about pictures of artworks, meaning that the situations described actually involve different layers of copyright. For this reason, it seemed interesting to us to write about this topic, hoping that this can help clear some misconceptions.
So, when planning to use pictures of famous artworks in your artistic or commercial activities, where you should start? Are you allowed to print pictures of old paintings on t-shirts? To turn a picture of contemporary artwork into an NFT if you have a licence to use that picture?
Here, a distinction has to be made between two layers of copyright: the copyright that may apply to the original artwork (e.g. painting), and the copyright that may apply to a photograph of this work.
Remember that those images themselves may be protected by copyright; as they are not ancient, it is very likely that the copyright would then still be in force. The issue of whether photographs of two- and three-dimensional works of art are protected by copyright as original works is a complex one and is not yet fully harmonised (article 14 of the recent DSM Directive takes a step in that direction, but it remains to be seen how Member States implement it and how it is enforced in practice). In certain countries, case law considers that making a photograph of a two-dimensional piece of art (a painting) does not involve the creativity and originality necessary to obtain copyright protection. The same courts will usually consider that photographs of three-dimensional art pieces (sculptures) may meet the creativity and originality thresholds and may therefore be copyrighted. In other jurisdictions, things are blurrier.
If the artwork is in the public domain, you are free to copy items without restriction. However, even if the artwork is in the public domain, the complete collection may not be reproduced and sold as a clip art collection because that may infringe the unique manner in which the art is collected (known as a compilation or collective work copyright).
The right to publish a copyrighted image is controlled by the copyright owner, so each copyrighted image that you use must have permission or fall within an exception to the general copyright statue, such as public domain, fair use, or open access. Copyright permission fees are sometimes waived or reduced for scholarly publications; if not, however, they can be quite expensive as well as time-consuming to obtain. We recommend that you begin the permissions process early to avoid any last-minute complications that may delay publication of your work. In addition to copyright permission, some museums and other providers of images charge a fee for the production or use of a digital image from their collections, even if the underlying work is in the public domain. Like permissions fees, use fees are sometimes waived or reduced for scholarly publications.
If you have your own high resolution photograph, you may use it freely since you own the copyright in your photograph. If, however, your photograph is of a copyrighted work of art, permission of the artist will be required unless it is a fair use. Note that many museums do not allow photography of works in their collections, so obtaining your own image of a work of art may not be an option. While architectural works are subject to copyright protection, photographs of publicly viewable buildings may be used. 17 U.S.C. 120(a).
If your image does not fall into any of the above categories, you will need to request permission from the copyright holder for use of the image. You may be able to obtain permission from one of the sites listed in the next section, or you may need to request permission from the artists or their representatives. The Artists Rights Society represents the intellectual property rights interests of visual artists and their estates worldwide and covers works in private collections as well as museums and galleries. ARS has a request form for permissions requests. Note that ARS handles permission requests only and does not supply images of the works.
Some museums, libraries, and archives have collections of public domain images available for use in scholarly publications. The content of the collections and the permitted uses vary among institutions. Many do not allow images to be used as cover art since that is usually considered to be a commercial use, and some limit use to print publications. Below is a list of libraries and museums that make works available with few or no restrictions.
For some of the sites listed below, the price will vary depending on which rights you need for publication: print/electronic, region of the world, number of languages, number of books, where the image will be placed (inside/cover), and size of the image. After entering that information, a license fee will display based on your use. The license fee is not automatically available for some images; for those, you will usually receive an email message after submitting your request. You should consult with your editor when selecting options to be sure you have selected the appropriate options for your book or article.
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