Robert, I would like to comment on a few things you said. Robert A. Baron wrote: [snip] > Yes, indeed, but there is a difference between a museum's obligations to > the "object" and its right to administer the "intellectual property" that > exudes from that object. As a Registrar I see no difference between the management of an institutions physical assests (i.e. the collection) and its intellectual assets (i.e. surrogate images, research reports, etc.). Each has significant "real world" value, both in the cost of creating them/acquiring them and in managing them. Even as a publically funded organization our intellectual property belongs to the Corporation of the City of Toronto -- I assure you they take their rights to manage these assets quite seriously. > The former needs attention to its physical > welfare, the latter, once copyright is no longer an issue, the law of > public domain frees to wander where it might. This passage into "public domain" is a significant assumption on your part. The US Copyright office has recognised Corbis' copyright to digital files (see _The Art Newspaper_ No. 60 [June 1996] page 6), these may well represent surrogate images for original images which may have passed into the public domain. Being sure something is public domain might be more difficult than we currently suppose in a digital realm. > Captions and other > identifying tags are themselves not copyrightable, so unless a museum can > create unique intellectual properties with which to surround their objects, > or services provided by staff; there may be little or no protectable value > in a good part of museum collections. Is this generally true? I understood that for literary works (such as a Shakespeare play) the Bard's text might be held as public domain, but the table of contents, index, gloss on the text, footnotes, etc. are held as copyright properties of the publisher. And wasn't there a court case in the early 1990s where an Israeli court granted a copyright to a reconstruction of a manuscript from Qumron (Dead Sea Scroll) to the scroll editor based on this principle. (I'll check my files on this one, but if any one can confirm or correct this I'd greatly appreciate it.) I guess what I am trying to say is this, as a Registrar I have a broader stewardship obligation to both the physical and intellectual property under my care. I seek a ballence between the needs of all user groups and those of the collections. Given limited resources helping one group may mean (regretably) that it will deny or delay access to another group. Richard Gerrard