
New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art makes available almost 400,000 images - alok-g
http://www.metmuseum.org/research/image-resources/frequently-asked-questions
======
jedahan
I wrote a very small API that scrapes the metropolitan museum's collections
pages to get info - pull requests / issues / feature requests welcome. I had
to rush rewrite it last weekend as they had completely redone the collections
pages (and now export a bit via xml - try appending xml=1 to any object page).

[http://github.com/jedahan/collections-
api](http://github.com/jedahan/collections-api)

[http://scrapi.org](http://scrapi.org)

This is my first foray into generators, and building an API that hopefully
will be used more publicly, so any suggestions are welcome.

Also if you want to chat about what its like working for the Met, more
specifically the media lab there, ask away!

Also, if you are looking for a giant dump of those images on a hard drive, get
in contact with me as the site is not the easiest to crawl. I only have about
260,000 of the images, and its about 260gb.

~~~
ars
Upload them to wikipedia commons. See:
[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Guide_to_batch_up...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Guide_to_batch_uploading)

Better finish getting them all before the museum adds restrictions.

------
gabemart
_The Museum 's OASC initiative provides license- and cost-free access to
images of artwork in the collection that the Museum believes to be in the
public domain and free of other known restrictions for scholarly use in any
media which the Museum has identified as Open Access for Scholarly Content
(OASC) Icon on the site_

I don't understand this in two ways.

i) How can the Met claim copyright of reproductive scans of works which are in
the public domain?

ii) If the Met provides "license-free" access to images to a certain group of
academics, even if we accept that the Met holds a copyright over those images
surely the academics are then free to redistribute those images license-free
such that they can be used by anyone for any purpose?

I don't really understand what "license-free" means in this context.

~~~
jedahan
i) They can claim what they want, and even if there is no way it would hold up
in court, can still discourage people from using what they do have the right
to use.

Does anyone know where we can lookup all the legal cases the Met has been
involved in? I am wondering if they have ever actually tried to enforce these
policies.

------
matt_morgan
They are overstating the case a little bit, but this is still a big step.
These images have actually been available since 2011; back then, until now, it
was under a license very similar to the old Creative Commons attribution-
noncommercial. But it was not so easily understood as a CC license.

What they have done recently is assert that images of artworks that are public
domain are also in the public domain. Other museums and institutions have done
this, but for the Met to do it is a big deal.

------
dredmorbius
This appears to be a very narrow degree of access, though there are some
attempts to make it more liberal:

"The Museum's OASC initiative provides license- and cost-free access to images
of artwork in the collection that the Museum believes to be in the public
domain and free of other known restrictions for scholarly use in any media...

"What is scholarly content?

"Scholarly content encompasses scholarly publication in all media and is
defined here as the dissemination of ideas and knowledge derived from study or
research for educational/cultural purposes.... Scholarly publication is not
limited to academic institutions or university publishers, since commercial
publishers/entities may also produce scholarly publications. Scholarly
publication is not restricted by print run. _For the purposes of the Museum 's
license-free Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC), users are encouraged to
make their own assessment._ However, all users must carefully review this
website's Terms and Conditions prior to downloading or using images or any
materials on this website.

"What are some examples of scholarly content?

"All school and academic work (including theses, dissertations, etc.),
conference proceedings, journal articles, essays in Festschrifts, museum
exhibition catalogues, non-commercially produced textbooks and educational
materials, books published by university presses or the academic/scholarly
imprint of commercial publishers, self-published books, and documentary films.
All of these examples apply to scholarly publication in any media format
(print, electronic, film, etc.)."

Note that this doesn't specifically include blogs, though "self-published
books" tends to suggest they are included. However:

"What is not scholarly content?

"Commercial use, publication, or distribution in any media or format is not
scholarly content. Some examples include: commercially published general-
interest books in print or electronic media; all products, merchandise,
(including posters, calendars, notecards, datebooks, mugs, etc.),
advertisements, or promotional materials for any services or products in any
media format; feature films or documentaries funded by commercial
organizations."

While I can appreciate the desire to prevent untrammeled commercial use, this
creates a fairly considerable area of ambiguity. Would a beaker incorporating
an image be considered scholarly use? An academic group using an image in a
presentation? For conference signage? For a conference shirt? Does the
consideration change if the shirts are included in registration or sold
separately?

How about images used in a scholarly work which is then cited, referenced,
quoted, or included in a "general interest" publication?

In previous licensing developments, attempts have been made to distinguish
"commercial" from "noncommercial" use. The boundaries have generally proven
less than clear. In particular, they tend to discourage further use of works
under such licenses.

One alternative is to distinguish use of images with other marks of the Museum
in use. The Debian Project draws this distinction: the entire distribution is
available free of charge, and there are a set of logos which are _similarly_
free to be used. There is _also_ a set of restricted logos which may be used
_only_ by the Debian Project itself (or others to whom it's specifically
licensed).

A converse of this would be to _require_ that an attribution or logo be
included in all uses of the images. In effect the images then become
additional advertising and publicity for the Museum. Of course, one risk
becomes use of images in contexts for which the Museum may not wish to be
associated (political content, sexually explicit uses, violent or other uses).

Another approach would be to limit the quality of images available. Even
fairly high-quality online images tend not to be applicable to, say, high-
quality hardcopy replication.

The fact that many of the works depicted in the images are themselves far
outside copyright protection only further muddies the situation.

~~~
jedahan
They do limit the quality of images. If you want to see the highest resolution
image, take any of the image urls and replace 'web-<WHATEVER>' with 'web-
original'.

This is a small step in showing they are trying to understand what it means to
'open up' access. Note that museum policy does not necessarily agree with the
law. In fact US law protected the user in cases where museum policy restricted
use.

The #1 cited fear within the museum for restricting access to imagery of
things like public domain objects? "We don't want people selling shower
curtains with our art on it".

The more people make interesting use of the content, the stronger our case can
be. Our being the people working for the museum who want to share more data.

~~~
Bud
Your second sentence doesn't mean what you think it means.

"Substitute X for Y" means to replace Y with X. Not the other way around. This
is often misused.

~~~
jedahan
hmm, I switched to using the word replace, is that better grammar?

------
hi2usir
this is going to ruin my productivity tomorrow

