Copyright is complicated

Posted on 14 January 2010 | Comments Off

Copyright is complicated. What’s protected? What’s not? And it’s even more complicated for art, where the work may not be dated and there are questions about whether it was “published” and what “publication” means. And it’s a legal matter, which is enough to make anyone a bit fearful about making a mistake.

On the other side of the coin, there’s a huge community hungry for images that they can use for a million different projects – websites, blogs, school papers, art projects, mashups. They’re willing to pay attention to whether an image is in the public domain or not, but they don’t always understand what that means, and the institutions with the images rarely provide useful guidance. Over the past several months, Brooklyn Museum staff members have been wrestling with this problem.

Read more: Brooklyn Museum: Copyright is complicated.

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