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 -------------------------------------