Museum Image Rights: How User Friendly?

How User-Friendly Are Museum Image Rights?

Claire Voon | June 10, 2015

If you’ve ever considered downloading a digital image of an artwork from a museum’s website, you probably know rather well that the world of copyright is an incredibly murky and difficult one to navigate. Even if artworks are in the public domain — in the US, this means copyright has expired, 70 years after an artist’s death — many cultural institutions still claim copyright on the digital representations that they have created and share on their websites. While exceptions largely allow users to download these pictures for personal, noncommercial, or educational purposes, these online legal conditions are often still difficult to completely understand, or sometimes, even find.

"A selection of the artworks you can download." Source: http://www.smk.dk/en/use-of-images-and-text/free-download-of-artworks/

<more at http://hyperallergic.com/304000/how-user-friendly-are-museum-image-rights/; related articles and links: http://displayatyourownrisk.org/ (Display At Your Own Risk. June 2016. About: Display At Your Own Risk (DAYOR):  is a research-led exhibition experiment featuring digital surrogates of public domain works of art produced by cultural heritage institutions of international repute. The project includes a Gallery Exhibition as well as an open source version of that exhibition intended for public use.) and http://www.smk.dk/en/use-of-images-and-text/free-download-of-artworks/ (Free Download of Artworks. June 13, 2016)>