but the debate about copyrights and reproductions is more open than ever
An article by Colin Marshall
appeared on the Open Culture website, about the trend of the biggest
players among the Museums worldwide to make their digitized
collections freely accessible and downloadable online.
This is certainly an opportunity but it also opens a debate about copyrights and reproductions.
“Many rights-holders, including certain
museums, have effectively decided that if you can’t beat the mechanical
reproducers, join ‘em.” “With the Internet, it’s so difficult to control your copyright or use of images,” Siegal [Nina Siegal, New York Times] quotes the Rijksmuseum’s director of collections as saying. “We
decided we’d rather people use a very good high-resolution image of
[Vermeer's] ‘Milkmaid’ from the Rijksmuseum rather than using a very bad
reproduction.”