Paris Museums Put 60,000+ Historic Photos Online, Copyright-Free (petapixel.com) 27
Long-time reader schwit1 shares a report: Paris Musees, a group of 14 public museums in Paris, has made a splash by releasing high-res digital images for over 100,000 artworks through a new online portal. All the works were released to the public domain (CC0, or "No Rights Reserved"), and they include 62,599 historic photos by some of the most famous French photographers such as Eugene Atget. The new website, called the Collections portal, was launched on January 8th and offers powerful search and filtering options for finding specific artworks.
Re:It's because photogrophy is a dead/dying art fo (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah. And because we have music notation software like Sibelius, anyone can write better music than Bach or Beethoven. And because we have video editting software, everyone can make better comedies than Chaplin. And because we have word processing, everyone can write better than Shakespeare.
Re:It's because photogrophy is a dead/dying art fo (Score:5, Insightful)
I recognize that I'm feeding the troll here, but I've heard this sort of argument presented semi-seriously, and it deserves a cogent response.
Yes, once upon a time, taking photos was difficult and expensive. What that meant was that each photo you took was done carefully, and with considerable thought. When I started shooting, it was with film, and taking a trip to shoot a subject meant spending at least a full day's wages on film and developing in order to get a handful of good ones that I was happy with. The financial costs meant I was careful with each frame, and took my sweet time before pressing the shutter. I was a good enough fine-art photographer that I had five one-man shows at various galleries in my city. The primary qualification of taking good photographs that moved my viewers was not the technical aspects of being in focus and getting the exposure of film and paper right, but knowing how to frame the subject and when to press the shutter.
When I switched to digital, I initially pressed the shutter more frequently because, you know, it's free! Or close to free, compared to shooting film. I ended up with scads and scads of photos, and my hit rate (keepers to trash) plummeted. Over time, I became more selective again and my hit rate came back up to where it was before. Sure, my photos are more clear now, sharper, with more detail, but that doesn't affect the impact of my compositions, really.
And that's true of essentially ALL of the masters: they weren't necessarily technical experts, they were experts at framing and timing. At finding subjects that were meaningful. Those photographs have context that make them powerful. Annie Liebowitz's work is technically perfect (except when she doesn't want it to be), but the portraits she takes are moving despite that, rather than because of it. Cartier-Bresson's work is grainy and fuzzy, but stunning nevertheless because he knew exactly when to press the shutter.
The other issue to bear in mind is that the photographs that are in museums have been culled as single representations from thousands and thousands of frames that were not considered as valuable. Even in a standard shoot, a photographer might take 50 or 100 frames in order to get one that satisfies the client; for a fine-art photographer who has a single photo hanging in a museum, thousands of frames were editorially rejected for that one print.
The point is, yes, technically photography has become much easier, and there are cameras in far more hands than ever before, but if you don't have the skills to frame and shoot a composition that will create an emotional impact, you'll spend your time taking snapshots, not museum pieces. And not everyone has those skills.
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" Cartier-Bresson's"
That was my first search. I think I'm going to enjoy this collection. I'll soon have some new screensaver slideshows.
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“Sharpness is a bourgeois concept.”
Henri Cartier-Bresson :-)
Kudos for CC0! (Score:5, Interesting)
No copyright? Somone had a sudden outbreak of common sense?
This is great news -- thanks for putting culture before profits.
Re:Kudos for CC0! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Kudos for CC0! (Score:4, Insightful)
You're claiming that there is no natural right of a creator to exclusive exploitation of their works? I think you're in the minority, there.
Copyright - yes, it's been badly abused - is the legal recognition that there *is* a natural right for exclusive exploitation.
All *rights* are legal constructs. Some are artificial, some are natural.
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You're claiming that there is no natural right of a creator to exclusive exploitation of their works? I think you're in the minority, there.
It depends on the jurisdiction [wikipedia.org]. In most of continental Europe, the "natural right" part of copyright is limited to the moral rights over a work, such as the right to claim authorship. These moral rights are, moreover, inalienable. The exploitation rights are separate there, and indeed generally not considered natural (and can be transferred at will).
Re:Kudos for CC0! (Score:4, Insightful)
You're claiming that there is no natural right of a creator to exclusive exploitation of their works? I think you're in the minority, there.
Copyright - yes, it's been badly abused - is the legal recognition that there *is* a natural right for exclusive exploitation.
All *rights* are legal constructs. Some are artificial, some are natural.
Completely wrong. Copyright and patents were created because the government saw that there was a benefit to society for authors and creators to have a limited monopoly for a short amount of time. There is no natural right to not be copied. Over the years different groups have went to great lengths to keep their secrets hidden so that they wouldn't be copied. Some things were so well protected that it died with the group and the knowledge was lost forever. Patents and copyrights should be long enough to encourage people to produce goods and share knowledge but as short as possible after that to encourage derivative works and standing on the shoulders of giants.
What this boils down to is that blockbuster movies like Avengers and Star Wars should probably have a copyright of less than 5 years for maximum benefit to society as within the first 5 years is when the majority of their profits are made and they would continue to produce movies even if copyrights were considerably shorter than they are today.
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Honestly there isn't anything wrong with long copyrights as long as the stuff is preserved, the problem is that the copyrights are so long that stuff isn't being preserved and there is no economic incentive to preserve it. There is a ton of stuff being lost, and it's because copyrights are so long that it's happening. Copyrights need to be shortened, in some cases dramatically to ensure this stuff isn't lost forever.
Myself I'm particularly concerned about digital assets that are being lost, how much softwar
Who would have owned Hamlet? (Score:2)
Honestly there isn't anything wrong with long copyrights as long as the stuff is preserved
Not only the work itself but also the chain of ownership needs to be preserved. For example, who would have inherited copyright in William Shakespeare's plays had "forever less one day" copyright been in effect at the time?
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The photos and artwork aren't copyrighted anymore but someone had to take the time to digitize them and pay to host them.
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There is no good reason any of his work should still be under copyright.
Cartier-Bresson died in 2004, so the same goes for him.
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Kudos for some great nation building optics granted to the world for "free".
Enjoy the free art? Visit France and enjoy it for real.
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Don't worry, some stock image company will add them to their database and start spamming DMCA notices any day now.
The was recently a case of some company claiming copyright over one of the YouTube sound library tracks that are licence-free for use on YouTube. Some channels got entirely demonetized because they used the track in every video.
Stealing copyright or stealing from the public domain is a popular scam these days.
Street scenes (Score:3)
There is a lot of boilerplate in these collections. The search function seems to work fairly well in this one. Search for "rue photographie" (street photo, roughly) for some interesting images. Here is a link [paris.fr].
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Now somebody download them all, sort them by date of the snapshot and and run them through a photogrammetry algorithm - we might get full 3D models of the most photographed areas at various times throughout the history.
super! (Score:1)
Site doesn't work in https? (Score:2)
Is it just me or is the site really incompatible with secure HTTP? Using Firefox with the following links:
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Are you worried that a man might step in the middle and send you an altered historic photograph of a man standing on a street corner?
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Http is the new green way to use the internet and save on power..
France is doing something green.. its not a problem its a green feature...
All the works were released to the public domain (Score:2)
All the works were released to the public domain (CC0, or "No Rights Reserved"
So what's to keep me from getting all of these and placing a copyright on them. They're in the public domain, so they're all up for fair grab, right?
And then I can make all of those nasty evil museums that posting MY works either take 'em down or pay a IP fee. I've done ALL of the effort here, now I get to reap ALL of the rewards. Isn't that how it works?
I'm just following Disney here, except with pictures instead of stories, so it's GOT to be legal, moral, and non-fattening.
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What a moron. Please provide any example of a public domain work that Disney copyrighted, and is now no longer in the public domain. I'll make it easy for you: there aren't any.
ML (Score:2)