We would appreciate a sense of the list re: the etiquette of placing images
from other museums on museum or museum-related websites.  The Memorial Art
Gallery of the University of Rochester has found several instances of images
from our collection showing up on other websites, without our permission
having been sought, or credit having been given.  We are formulating a web
image permissions policy before communicating with the sites in question,
and would appreciate any philosophical and/or suggested ideas for inclusion
in our policy statement.  Some of these are websites are that promote
themselves as museum interest-related.

Granted that there are some images that are in public domain in the US, (and
which may or may not be in public domain in their country of origin) and
that fair use will be a consideration for some users even if copyright does
apply, should we not expect/ask for the minimum courtesy of a credit line,
and better, a link to our website?  In text-based fair use, if one copies a
work without citing the source, one could be subject to a charge of
plagiarism.  Why not with appropriation of images to a website?

In all these instances, the image has been scanned from a print source, as
none of the images are available in that form in our website--we've made a
point of including label info within the .gif file for all images in our
website.  Needless to say, once an  image is on the web it's available for
anyone else to copy freely.  Since the image is unattributed, all those
additional sites will also be unattributed and the problem will balloon.  I
know we can't do much about individuals' personal websites, but would it be
amiss for museum professionals to state a collective sense of what is or is
not appropriate for websites that are more closely tied to the profession?

Thanks for your feedback.

Lu Harper
webmaster
Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester
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