As of World’s Fair Use Day, the Brooklyn Museum now includes much more rights-status information in its online collection and has fully integrated this information into its API. Many Commons fans — who are often also Creative Commons fans — will appreciate this change as well, announced by Shelley Bernstein:
Lastly, we’ve taken one more baby step in the ongoing direction of opening up more content—with images and text that we own the copyright to, we’ve changed our default Creative Commons license on the site from a CC-BY-NC-ND to a CC-BY-NC, to allow for greater re-use of materials.
Deborah Wythe, Head of Digital Collections and Services (and a past contributor to Indicommons), writes in the Brooklyn’s blog about the complex decision-making and time-consuming groundwork that made all this possible. The Brooklyn online collection’s users are also invited to join in, as those of us who use the Commons have, in providing new and better information:
Now that we’ve included all of this information on the collections pages, I’m hoping that members of our community will jump in and help with the project, just like they have on Flickr Commons. If you have more information about our artists (are you one of them?) — get in touch! If you think we’ve gotten something wrong, let us know and we’ll fix it.
Keep an eye on the museum blog for further posts, which promise to shed more light on the dark corners of copyright issues in museums:
I’ll be providing more detailed information about the project in future blog postings. Stay tuned for a post on our guidelines and I’m thinking about digging into the publication history of some works in the collection to show what it really takes to declare something “public domain.” Let me know if there are topics you’d like to hear about (keeping in mind that I am very definitely NOT a lawyer).
The ship’s cats, HMS ‘Hawkins’
