What Hokusai’s Great Wave tells us about museums, copyright, online collections

https://medium.com/open-glam/the-great-wave-what-hokusais-masterpiece-tells-us-about-museums-copyright-and-online-da0f25bd4ed2

by bryanrasmussen • 7 years ago

106 24 7 years ago

medium.com

zeeZ2• 7 years ago

The copies of The Great Wave in collections around the world are not only different in color and tone. There are many reproductions of varying quality among them.

David Bull, a woodblock print maker in Tokyo, made his own reproduction in 2015 and explains some of the differences in his video series about the project.

This one's a summary, starting at 04:00: https://youtu.be/BizndSI4Nfc

kodisha• 7 years ago

Geeee, thanks for sending me down this rabbit hole :D

scott_s• 7 years ago

He is delightful. I want to watch more from him.

zengargoyle• 7 years ago

David Bull is awesome, I recommend you check out his website and YouTube if you like this woodblock print stuff. Not sure if he still does, but he used to Twitch stream carving blocks a couple of times a week.

zerocrates2• 7 years ago

Museums and archives like to claim (and perhaps hope) otherwise, but there's no copyright to claim in a scan of a 19th-century ukiyo-e print.

In the US anyway, copyright requires a modicum of originality and creativity not present in a simple faithful digitization. Though the caselaw is perhaps murkier than might be ideal.

tinus_hn• 7 years ago

The fact that this work is clearly out of copyright does not imply any obligation on part of these museums to provide anyone with copies. They may not be able to impose terms on the basis of copyright but they might be on the basis of providing a service.

stereo• 7 years ago

Some museums do claim to impose copyright terms on simple digitalisations of public domain works. It is a ludicrous claim they mostly get away with: it completely goes against the idea of public domain, and claims creative protection on a work where there is as little creativity as possible involved.

Mindwipe2• 7 years ago

In the US anyway, copyright requires a modicum of originality and creativity not present in a simple faithful digitization

Originality and creativity are required in Europe too, but there's stacks of case law in the UK that framing, lighting, colour correction etc are sufficient to count as a work.

zerocrates2• 7 years ago

My understanding of the situation in the UK is that it's roughly as uncertain as that in the US, though admittedly I'm much less familiar with the UK particulars. For example though, this is an excerpt from a recent publication of the UK Intellectual Property Office:

Are digitised copies of older images protected by copyright?

Simply creating a copy of an image won’t result in a new copyright in the new item. However, there is a degree of uncertainty regarding whether copyright can exist in digitised copies of older images for which copyright has expired. Some people argue that a new copyright may arise in such copies if specialist skills have been used to optimise detail, and/or the original image has been touched up to remove blemishes, stains or creases.

However, according to the Court of Justice of the European Union which has effect in UK law, copyright can only subsist in subject matter that is original in the sense that it is the author’s own ‘intellectual creation’. Given this criteria, it seems unlikely that what is merely a retouched, digitised image of an older work can be considered as ‘original’. This is because there will generally be minimal scope for a creator to exercise free and creative choices if their aim is simply to make a faithful reproduction of an existing work.

Interestingly, the most on-point case for the US, Bridgeman v. Corel, actually applied UK copyright law in addition to US law. This case's status as a non-binding district court decision is the source of much of the uncertainty on the US side of things, so obviously it's even less binding in the UK as a decision of a foreign court.

Mindwipe2• 7 years ago

This article seems rather perfunctory tbh. Funding is quite a big deal for museums, and the assumption put forward that open access is inherently better than anything else the museum can do with the money it raises by licenses is completely unsupported.

0815test• 7 years ago

Fubding may be a big deal for museums in the abstract, but how much funding do these museums raise from selling "licenses" to reproduction of these public domain works? It can't be that big of a deal, and museums can still request payment for endorsed reproductions (basically a quasi-sponsorship arrangement targeted at high-profile reusers of these works, driven by signaling goals - "we pay for the museum's endorsement, this shows we're serious!" and broadly-aligned incentives - "the more reproductions the better, for both the museum and the reuser") without any need for quasi-copyright claims.

beautifulfreak• 7 years ago

The Library of Congress print is even larger than reported in this article, a 146.1 MB TIFF https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2008661021/

martin_a• 7 years ago

Great! Think I will add another copy to the world. :-D

inetsee2• 7 years ago

I find it interesting that the only download options are a couple of jpegs that are less than 200Kb, or a TIFF that's 146 Mb.

DC-3• 7 years ago

From the huge TIFF I exported and uploaded a 11.3MB JPEG here:

https://github.com/DC-3/wave/blob/master/wave.jpg

HeWhoLurksLate• 7 years ago

Does anyone find it mildly ironic that the platform used to publish this was Medium?

ginko• 7 years ago

This makes me wonder: Are there any original woodblocks for the "great" ukiyo-e artists that survived?

zeeZ2• 7 years ago

Hard to tell. Since the prints were so cheap back then the individual blocks were used until they were worn down if they were popular, and then probably either cut down to be reused for a different carving or just tossed out.

Identifying an original would be near impossible too, since popular ones would be copied or recarved. Does a second edition from the same shop count as an original?

jmkd2• 7 years ago

The fact is, you can purchase a $100M Picasso but you'll have no right to put an image of it on your website unless you pay extra to the Picasso Estate. Alongside the reproduction rights discussed in the article, these two elements are so poorly understood that they seem universally exploited by rights holders, copyright agencies, artist's descendants and so on, all to the detriment of the public.

Globally, there's a ~70 year gap [1] in the comprehensive digital representation of modern art, where work from artists who died <70 years ago is subject to such fees or legal obstacles that it often can't be shown online, even by the current owners or gatekeepers [2].

On related topics, museums continue to think some or all of the following:

  1. Digital collections will prevent physical visitors from coming through the door.

  2. Making digital collections freely available will lead to a plethora of badly made t-shirts, bags and prints that the museum gains no revenue from.

  3. Digital collections offer a revenue stream that will save the museum from funding cuts.

  4. Museums should divert resources to build their own collection systems and web platforms.

  5. Our museum is so uniquely special that digital solutions used by others can be readily dismissed as irrelevant.

Rights and digital issues combined mean the representation of art in the digital age remains a complete mess, and as we see in other media a void is filled by legally-questionable and often short-lived solutions.

[1] https://www.wikiart.org/en/pablo-picasso (scroll to bottom) [2] https://webapps.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/explorer/index.php?qu=&...

ElFitz2• 7 years ago

Sure. But unlike Picasso, Hokusai has been dead for ages. How can anyone legitimately claim any copyright on his work today?

jmkd2• 7 years ago

From reproduction rights, see main article.

hestipod• 7 years ago

I hate that everything beautiful in this world is monetized. It's the root of all evil in my opinion. Greed and profits to feed ego and personal status. I think even in a Star Trek post scarcity fantasy the "Ferengi" will still be out there trying to squeeze personal wealth out of everyone. So much of life is behind a paywall and only available to a few. I dream of a world where we create and do things for enjoyment and the enjoyment of others. Where everything doesn't have to be priced or guarded to prevent others from pricing it. Naive I know...

What Hokusai’s Great Wave tells us about museums, copyright, online collections

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