Cristiano,

Do you have any evidence that the "general use" of high res images is to
print books and magazines? That strikes me as highly unlikely. If it were
true then we would expect to find only a handful of downloads per high-res
image - which I suppose (granted without much quantitative evidence) is not
the case.

But maybe it depends somewhat on the definition of high-res. I agree that I
rarely care about downloading an image bigger than say 3000x4000 pixels
(unless I wanted to be able to zoom in on a small detail) but lots of
museums are posting thumbnails (say 300x400) and pretending that is an
adequate size for "normal" screen viewing. Maybe someone who doesn't really
care about art and just wants to see what the picture was "of" might find
that adequate, but the practice is ultimately a disservice to the art (and
craft) of painting itself.

As a concrete example, I recently wanted to  look at Lorenzo Lotto's
Allegory of Vice and Virtue which is at the National gallery of Art in
Washington DC and found a measly 300x400 image as the magnified view (
http://www.nga.gov/fcgi-bin/timage_f?object=297&image=1111&c=)

What would be the public good of having access to what you so tellingly call
"good quality imagery". Well, to be able to see the painting, for starters.

And why would I want an image of say 3000x4000 pixels? In my case, not to
print a book or magazine but to see the detail of the infant with the
dividers (Virtue) in the lower left of the painting in sufficient detail to
compare it to Blake's image of Newton as divine geometer. (
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Newton-WilliamBlake.jpg)  I
was hoping to blog about the relation between the two images, which granted
is a form of publication but not one, I hope, you are not hoping to prevent.
(Check out the two images, it is kind of interesting.)

But the NGA has done their best to frustrate my perfectly legitimate use of
this image because... Why? They are hoping to sell me a copy of it in high
resolution? Well, I am not going to pay for it. In fact, I am not even going
to bother to write to them and request an image for free. I am just going to
write about something else. Now I am not pretending that it is a major loss
to the public good if I don't publish this precise observation but many a
mickle makes a muckle and this all adds up to a general impoverishment of
public discourse and learning, which I deplore.

You justify this on the grounds that museums are poor and this is a good way
of financing them. Yet museums provide free access to many assets that have
cost money to produce. In fact, I would argue that it is precisely their
mission to do so. The big question (and it is a major question of our time
for the museum world) is whether facilitating access to digital images of
public domain artwork is something that it should be part of the mission of
museums. I believe it should.

I also believe that attempts to frustrate the distribution of such images
are futile and counterproductive. The question is whether museums will be
seen as champions of access to our cultural commons, or enemies of it. This
may involve changing some existing business models. So be it. The purpose of
copyright law is not to prevent change, but to further the common good.

This, of course, is one of the grand debates of our time. We don't need to
rehash it here. But what I would point out - and think is very interesting
and perhaps less picked-over as a topic - is the problem posed by the
knowledge that debates on topics like this will be archived,
copied, disseminated - and the danger that the debate may be stifled due to
the perceived risk of taking controversial positions in forums such as this.

Jeff


On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 9:46 AM, Cristiano Bianchi <
[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> The problem comes when high quality imagery is downloaded off the websites
> of such institutions. What is the 'public good' in such a practice? What
> use
> do the public download the images for?
>
>  Also because those assets - at high res -
> are generally used to print books or magazine, which are also sold for
> money.
>

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