From: [log in to unmask](Robert A. Baron)

>As any museum visual resources curator knows, owners of
copyrighted
>intellectual properly in museums everyday determine whether
to charge for
>use of intellectual property or whether to allow it to be
used for free.  I
>see little difference here, except (hold onto your hat
Amalyah) that much
>of the intellectual property held by museums is out of
copyright and it
>would seem that they have no right to control its use, aside
from
>merchandising the photographs of objects.


Yup -- that's exactly what we do.


>Yet the right of owners to sell
>rights to visual works in the public domain is well
established in our
>tradition, if not entirely consistent with international
law.


We don't sell "rights" to visual works in the public domain.
We sell reproduction
rights to our photographs, which are very much in copyright &
not in the public
domain (yet).


>Like the
>tradition which gives archaeologists the right of first
publication of
>their finds, there is no legal foundation for the practice.


In the US, perhaps not; in Israel, there is legal foundation.




>In the United States the New York Times is rather
ubiquitous, one can go to
>any library or in New York, nearly any cafe or trash can and
find a copy to
>read.  In Europe, not so.  Consequently, charging
individuals with country
>codes in their domain names (il for Ms. Keshet), does not
seem so much out
>of the ordinary.
>--

I'd look at it this way: in the US, the on-line version of
the NYT competes with
conventional subscriptions; theoretically subscription volume
could drop because
people could access it free via the Web instead.  Outside the
US, few subscribe to
the NYT because it costs a king's ransom & arrives
light-years late; therefore, the
on-line version theoretically wouldn't be a big threat.

More to the point:  we tend to assume that "cyberspace" is a
borderless, anarchistic
global village free of government control, and jump up and
down & protest when the
government tries to enact controls.  Let's face it, exclusion
by country code (or any code) has
sinister overtones.
-------------------------------------
amalyah keshet
director, visual resources, the israel museum, jerusalem
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
date: 09/23/96
visit our web site at http://www.imj.org.il
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