museums

Museums Exploiting Public-Domain Artworks

The world’s museums are stewards of millions of images that constitute our cultural patrimony. But are museums willing to share the images that are legally in the public domain? Canadian legal scholar Michael Geist, writing in the Ottawa Citizen, notes that many museums are exploiting their control over public-domain images to limit public access to them and make money. The National Gallery of Canada, for example, charges a “permission fee,” over and above any administrative or reproduction fees, to requesters of copies of public-domain artworks.