EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

How Museums Rob the Public

Do you know who owns the copyright on the Mona Lisa? No-one, of course, because Leonardo is long dead. Try telling that to the Metropolitan Museum, though. A few years ago they started to claim copyright on the images of everything in their collection except, of course, works by living artists and those recently dead who still have lawyers around to stop them. Everything else you now need to ask the Met’s permission for. Publishers are paying a fortune to American museums to reproduce images of Old Master paintings, Renaissance altarpieces, fourteenth-century prints, you name it. They used to pay nothing on works whose makers were long dead. The publishers now pay and spike up book prices rather than sue them. The consumer gets hit and fewer art books get published – and at a time when color printing has never been so cheap.

The museums claim – and it’s a specious argument – that they have copyright on the photograph of the painting even though the US courts have already established that a direct copy is not copyrightable. The copy must be altered in some way. Publishers put up with this nonsense because to litigate would take years and gazillions of dollars. In the meantime their relationship with the museums would be broken so they pay and put up with it. You would think it would be a juicy story for the New York Times but the Chairman of the Times was for decades, and until recently, the Chairman of the Metropolitan. You won’t hear anything from them about this. Any other journalists out there?