
What Hokusai’s Great Wave tells us about museums, copyright, online collections - bryanrasmussen
https://medium.com/open-glam/the-great-wave-what-hokusais-masterpiece-tells-us-about-museums-copyright-and-online-da0f25bd4ed2
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zeeZ
The copies of The Great Wave in collections around the world are not only
different in color and tone. There are many reproductions of varying quality
among them.

David Bull, a woodblock print maker in Tokyo, made his own reproduction in
2015 and explains some of the differences in his video series about the
project.

This one's a summary, starting at 04:00:
[https://youtu.be/BizndSI4Nfc](https://youtu.be/BizndSI4Nfc)

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kodisha
Geeee, thanks for sending me down this rabbit hole :D

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jmkd
The fact is, you can purchase a $100M Picasso but you'll have no right to put
an image of it on your website unless you pay extra to the Picasso Estate.
Alongside the reproduction rights discussed in the article, these two elements
are so poorly understood that they seem universally exploited by rights
holders, copyright agencies, artist's descendants and so on, all to the
detriment of the public.

Globally, there's a ~70 year gap [1] in the comprehensive digital
representation of modern art, where work from artists who died <70 years ago
is subject to such fees or legal obstacles that it often can't be shown
online, even by the current owners or gatekeepers [2].

On related topics, museums continue to think some or all of the following:

    
    
      1. Digital collections will prevent physical visitors from coming through the door.
    
      2. Making digital collections freely available will lead to a plethora of badly made t-shirts, bags and prints that the museum gains no revenue from.
    
      3. Digital collections offer a revenue stream that will save the museum from funding cuts.
    
      4. Museums should divert resources to build their own collection systems and web platforms.
    
      5. Our museum is so uniquely special that digital solutions used by others can be readily dismissed as irrelevant.
    

Rights and digital issues combined mean the representation of art in the
digital age remains a complete mess, and as we see in other media a void is
filled by legally-questionable and often short-lived solutions.

[1] [https://www.wikiart.org/en/pablo-
picasso](https://www.wikiart.org/en/pablo-picasso) (scroll to bottom) [2]
[https://webapps.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/explorer/index.php?qu=&...](https://webapps.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/explorer/index.php?qu=&Oop=OR&Fma=picasso&Fpp=&Fmt=&Fob=&Fds=&Fdst=AD&Fde=&Fdet=AD&Oaa=true&Oat=true&do=Search&size=10&dti=text)

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ElFitz
Sure. But unlike Picasso, Hokusai has been dead for ages. How can anyone
legitimately claim any copyright on his work today?

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jmkd
From reproduction rights, see main article.

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ElFitz
I read it, but I must have missed that. Thank you!

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zerocrates
Museums and archives like to claim (and perhaps hope) otherwise, but there's
no copyright to claim in a scan of a 19th-century ukiyo-e print.

In the US anyway, copyright requires a modicum of originality and creativity
not present in a simple faithful digitization. Though the caselaw is perhaps
murkier than might be ideal.

~~~
tinus_hn
The fact that this work is clearly out of copyright does not imply any
obligation on part of these museums to provide anyone with copies. They may
not be able to impose terms on the basis of copyright but they might be on the
basis of providing a service.

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stereo
Some museums do claim to impose copyright terms on simple digitalisations of
public domain works. It is a ludicrous claim they mostly get away with: it
completely goes against the idea of public domain, and claims creative
protection on a work where there is as little creativity as possible involved.

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beautifulfreak
The Library of Congress print is even larger than reported in this article, a
146.1 MB TIFF
[https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2008661021/](https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2008661021/)

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inetsee
I find it interesting that the only download options are a couple of jpegs
that are less than 200Kb, or a TIFF that's 146 Mb.

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DC-3
From the huge TIFF I exported and uploaded a 11.3MB JPEG here:

[https://github.com/DC-3/wave/blob/master/wave.jpg](https://github.com/DC-3/wave/blob/master/wave.jpg)

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inetsee
Thank you. I think I would have gotten around to re-scaling the image down to
a more reasonable size eventually. This saves me that effort.

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ginko
This makes me wonder: Are there any original woodblocks for the "great"
ukiyo-e artists that survived?

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zeeZ
Hard to tell. Since the prints were so cheap back then the individual blocks
were used until they were worn down if they were popular, and then probably
either cut down to be reused for a different carving or just tossed out.

Identifying an original would be near impossible too, since popular ones would
be copied or recarved. Does a second edition from the same shop count as an
original?

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hestipod
I hate that everything beautiful in this world is monetized. It's the root of
all evil in my opinion. Greed and profits to feed ego and personal status. I
think even in a Star Trek post scarcity fantasy the "Ferengi" will still be
out there trying to squeeze personal wealth out of everyone. So much of life
is behind a paywall and only available to a few. I dream of a world where we
create and do things for enjoyment and the enjoyment of others. Where
everything doesn't have to be priced or guarded to prevent others from pricing
it. Naive I know...

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HeWhoLurksLate
Does anyone find it mildly ironic that the platform used to _publish_ this was
Medium?

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Mindwipe
This article seems rather perfunctory tbh. Funding is quite a big deal for
museums, and the assumption put forward that open access is inherently better
than anything else the museum can do with the money it raises by licenses is
completely unsupported.

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0815test
Fubding may be a big deal for museums in the abstract, but _how_ much funding
do these museums raise from selling "licenses" to reproduction of these public
domain works? It can't be _that_ big of a deal, and museums can still request
payment for _endorsed_ reproductions (basically a quasi-sponsorship
arrangement targeted at _high-profile_ reusers of these works, driven by
signaling goals - "we pay for the museum's endorsement, this shows we're
serious!" and broadly-aligned incentives - "the more reproductions the better,
for both the museum and the reuser") without any need for quasi-copyright
claims.

