New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art releases 375,000 digital works for remix and re-use online via CC0

Open Access |  Digital Humanities | Art

Jennie Rose Halperin | Feburary 7, 2017

Today, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announces that all public domain images in its collection will be shared under CC0, expanding their digital collection by over 375,000 images as well as providing data on over 420,000 museum objects spanning more than 5,000 years. CC0 allows anyone to use, re-use, and remix a work without restriction. This announcement will shape the future of public domain images online and underscores the Met’s leadership role as one of the most important open museum collections in the world.

Creative Commons CEO Ryan Merkley joined the Met to announce the release. The Met collection of CC0 images can be browsed on the new CC Search beta, also announced this morning.

“Sharing is fundamental to how we promote discovery, innovation, and collaboration in the digital age,” said Merkley. “Today, The Met has given the world a profound gift in service of its mission: the largest museum in the United States has eliminated the barriers that would otherwise prohibit access to its content, and invited the world to use, remix, and share their public domain collections widely and without restriction.” Read more...

New York Public Library Invites a Deep Digital Dive By JENNIFER SCHUESSLERJAN. 6, 2016

Part of one of the “Tale of Genji” scrolls available for easy exploration now that the New York Public Library has released nearly 200,000 public-domain items from its special collections. CreditSpencer Collection, The New York Public Library

Mansion Maniac, a whimsical online toy created by the New York Public Library, may seem like envy bait for the real-estate have-nots. With the help of a Pac-Man-like icon, users can explore the floor plans of some of the city’s most extravagant early-20th-century residences, culled from the library’s archives.

But the game is what you might call a marketing teaser for a major redistribution of property, digitally speaking: the release of more than 180,000 photographs, postcards, maps and other public-domain items from the library’s special collections in downloadable high-resolution files — along with an invitation to users to grab them and do with them whatever they please.

Digitization has been all the rage over the past decade, as libraries, museums and other institutions have scanned millions of items and posted them online. But the library’s initiative (nypl.org/publicdomain), which goes live on Wednesday, goes beyond the practical questions of how and what to digitize to the deeper one of what happens next.  Read more...

Lawsuit Seeks to Put Sherlock Holmes in the Public Domain

Lawsuit Seeks to Put Sherlock Holmes in the Public Domain

credit: http://www.sherlockholmesonline.org/

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

To author and scholar Leslie Klinger, it’s elementary: the characters of Sherlock Holmes and John H. Watson are solidly in the public domain, and should be free for creators to use in new works. But after recent efforts by the Arthur Conan Doyle Estate to extract license fees, Klinger (who is also a lawyer) filed suit in federal court last week against the estate, asking the court to declare that the famous characters of Holmes and Watson are no longer protected by federal copyright laws.

In a statement, Klinger says that the litigation became necessary after the Doyle estate attempted to extract a license fee for a new book he was co-editing, In the Company of Sherlock Holmes (Pegasus Books) with author Laurie R. King, the bestselling author of the "Mary Russell" series of mysteries that also feature Sherlock Holmes. “The Conan Doyle Estate contacted our publisher and implied that if the Estate wasn't paid a license fee, they'd convince the major distributors not to sell the book,” he stated. “Our publisher was, understandably, concerned, and told us that the book couldn't come out unless this was resolved.” Read more...

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