“]

Richard Westall, "Sword of Damocles," [1812, via Wikimedia Commons,Ackland Museum, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States of America

At Vintage Printable we’re always on the lookout for new digital, public domain images for you to copy, print or download.  And so, we were excited to see the Google Art Project , which is “a collaboration between Google and 151 acclaimed partners across 40 countries. . .”

Bravo, Google. If any readers have not checked it out, it is yet another great time-eater.

We’re sad that, even with this miraculous project, we have to complain: which images are available for use, and which ones aren’t?

Per the FAQ, using the digital “slavish copies” of the public domain works may violate purported copyrights from the museums:

The high resolution imagery of artworks featured on the art project site are owned by the museums, and these images may be subject to copyright laws around the world. The Street View imagery is owned by Google [Swivelchair note: We're ok with that]. All of the imagery on this site is provided for the sole purpose of enabling you to use and enjoy the benefit of the art project site, in the manner permitted by Google’s Terms of Service . The normal Google Terms of Service apply to your use of the entire site.

We have no idea what images are available for use on our site– and so, we perceive the use of images from Google Art Projects as sort of a “gotcha” situation — you don’t know if you’ll be violating someone’s purported rights until after you use the image. So, we regret, that we won’t be posting any of the images here.

Our complaint isn’t really about Google, we don’t think. We think it would be in Google’s interest to  selling adverts on pages displaying the images. No, we think the complaint is with the museums and other non-profit institutions that own the physical copies of the art.

While we sympathize with museums and educational institutions who are non-profits and have budget cuts, our view is this (from our ABOUT, DISCLAIMER, AND A PUBLIC DOMAIN MANIFESTO page):

. . . [A]s with any new technology that eliminates the middle man, there are vested interests in the old way of making money. There are some entities that would like to take really old, out of copyright two- dimensional works, take a photo (albeit, a professional photo), and then claim: “Gotcha. New copyright, pay me. ”

Our own view is that this is wrong: the whole point of copyright law is that it only lasts for a period of time, not forever.  If copyright lasted forever, then there would be no dissemination of new ideas, because everyone would be frozen afraid to be sued — among a zillion other reasons. Plus copyright rewards creativity — not work. Mere duplication shouldn’t count as creativity. If copyright rewarded the amount of work, then a high-throughput scanner could be an author. Copyright rewards the tangible embodiment of creativity — even if you only wake up and do that creative thing in a fog for one second and then fall asleep or watch cute kitten videos all day long, as some at château Swivelchair are wont to do. You can be brilliantly creative and hardly work at all. This is what many people strive for and copyright protects that.

Think: would DaVinci be thrilled with the British libraries and other places that claim: “Gotcha! All the world has enjoyed your work for millenia, but now that we paid to hire a really good photographer who knows how to light it to take a really good photo and so we get to own the rights again! ”

This is wrong on so many levels.

Institutions do have an argument: “We spent good money digitizing these — like a zillion dollars! Now we should control who gets to print these out or copy these digitally!”

Our answer: If taxpayer money paid for (a) the original acquisition of the object; (b) the scanning/photography, as well as museum overhead, then shouldn’t the otherwise public domain scan belong to the public?

Here’s another argument: It’s private funds, from rich people.

Our Answer: Then give back any tax deductions you take. If you claim that private money gives you the right to make profit on the things you buy with it then to me that indicates you are not an non-profit institution. Just pay the back taxes and we’ll call it square.  More than that, it’s usually private commingled with taxpayer money.

Google states “Users can explore a wide range of artworks at brushstroke level detail. . .” and perhaps this is why the museums consider the photos of public domain artworks to be copyrightable — they consider them 3d works and not 2d.* Tricky, museums. What about works on paper or works where the media does not have “brushstrokes?”

One of the leading US cases on this, as we understand it, involves the preparation of a CD ROM of photos of out-of-copyright museum paintings (Bridgman Art Library v Corell), where the court in New York held that it was not only not a copyright infringement for Corell to make and sell CDs of art work photos, but also that there was no copyright to begin with (because “slavish copies” of 2d art works are not independently copyrightable).  This case has caused the museum to spill their teacups, indubitably, among them the private “Museums Copyright Group” in the UK.   Their view (our emphasis):

“… following Bridgeman -v- Corel it is vital that the museum community are clear on where they stand in relation to photographic copyright. While museums will always need to protect themselves contractually, the Report and leading counsel’s opinion gives museums the confidence to continue releasing photographs of objects in their collections. This is extremely important news for the sector and will ensure that museums can continue to monitor reproduction quality, protect the integrity of the work, and not least to protect a vital source of income for many museums”.

Short version: Private gain, public costs.

Recall: public institutions get their collections from (a) war spoils (publicly funded); (b) private bequests and donations (tax-deductable); (c) taxpayer funded purchases; (d) taxpayer -sponsored art projects (like, WPA).

It’s even worse, in our opinion, because many public art repositories prohibit photographing the artworks yourself (in a non-damaging way). (And we tried**).  Combine that with the purported “copyright” on their own digital images, and voila: monopolizing public domain works that the public has paid for already. And so these public institutions don’t merely own the copyright of their own photos, they want to slurp the public domain image back into the toothpaste tube of creativity and pretend they are the original authors — so they can control all versions — essentially re-copyrighting it under their own ownership.

Our view: Ugh.

Aren’t public museums supposed to be for the public dissemination of knowledge? As stated by the British Museum Governance Policies and Principles (Part I — Aim of the British Museum, page 3):

The Aim of the British Museum (“the Museum”) is to hold for the benefit and education of humanity a collection representative of world cultures (“the Collection”), and ensure that the Collection is housed in safety, conserved, curated, researched and
exhibited. [FN:This statement represents a modern expression of the objectives of the Museum set out in the British Museum Act 1753].

If one goes back to the British Museum Act of 1753, the museum was created so that wealthy British personages could store their collections “for God and the Public.”  Privatizing art images doesn’t seem to fit with this, regardless of dancing on the head of the copyright pin.

But all of this is pretense. The problem is money:  Museums purportedly don’t have enough money.***

And the solution?  Expensive admissions and exits through the gift shops. In other words, in order to see the public treasures, you have to go through the museum control, rather than any other source. Museums want to monopolize the use of the public art works for rent-seeking, non-productive activities (a.k.a. paying museum administration and providing tax deductions for rich people).

Hence the sword of Damocles hanging over the use of images from Google Art Project.  Want to use an image? It has brushstrokes – so “gotcha.”

Our view as to what should happen:  Museums should encourage the public to take, use, and create with these digital images (and we’re talking about public domain works, not works currently in copyright). Why not have an Etsy store within the museum gift shops to permit the public to actually make money from these works? Maybe if the creative class could use the images without fear they could make their own jobs, make money, and then pay taxes, some of which would go back to the museum.

But nooo. Museum trustees don’t want the public to make money off the artworks they (the public) paid for.  Museums have a great opportunity here, by providing a creativity hub for business and jobs. They’re blowing it by requiring that we all exit through the gift shop to pay monopoly rents.

While we’re grateful to Google and the institutions who participated, we are disappointed that there is still the copyright sword of Damocles hanging over our heads if we step out of bounds as they define it and use any of the digitized images of the public domain works.  And so, sadly, we will not be posting any works from Google Art Projects.

* Taken to it’s logical extreme, Google’s copies of public domain books would be a copyright violation — what’s the difference between a high-res digital copy of printed matter (like a book) and a high-res digital copy of a 2-d image? None.  So we presume that the museums are relying on “brushstrokes.”   But, which images can you use commercially?  Works on paper? Pastels? Oil-on-board? Gouache? Chalk? Wood-block?  Illuminated manuscripts? The ambiguity and vagueness seems to us to be an extension of the purported “copyright” monopoly to non-copyrighted images. Or laziness: Museums — are all digitized images within your purported “copyrights”? What about “slavish” copies (scans) of 2 d images in the public domain? How about copies of public domain books that contain photos of public domain works, including the brushstrokes or other 3-d aspects? 

**We have a plan: A year or so ago we were at UC Berkeley’s Doe Library, up on the top floor where we saw a room with a sign, “Rare Book Reading Room.”  We banged on the door and rattled the knob, but no one was home. Anyway, entry was only for grad students and faculty.  We’re neither.  As we cogitated this situation over a coffee, the barrista said she was an . . .  art history grad student. (Actually we could tell). (Tats and piercings and all).  Soooo…. when we have more time, we plan on bribing hiring our mole to go into the public institution to scan public domain images (without damaging anything, of course) that our tax dollars already paid for. Shh. Don’t tell anyone.

*** Our view is that the financial services industry has taken a hatchet to the middle class, and so tax dollars are scarce, and museums must rely on rich people (a.k.a., financial services). We’ve blogged ad nauseum about the financial services industry dysfunction on our other blog. So museums are like one big Greece — indebted to bankers who basically have a lien on the historical treasures bought and paid for by public tax dollars.

Mores Italien, 1575.  White flowing robes with hood, and rick-rack trim in the shape of cross. Blood stained back indicating flagellation . Via Yale U. Scan of 2 d image in the public domain believed to be free to use without restriction in the US.

For reasons both good (we’re moving back to SF bay area! yay), and not so good (we have to write a book chapter that we really don’t want to do, on nanomaterials, something we know next to nothing about, and plus our dear friend who was the editor has just suddenly passed away), we’ve been negligent here.

Maybe once we get up to the bay area we’ll do something in the brick and mortar world. Hmm.

“SOPA,” the misleadingly named “Stop On Line Piracy Act” (Wikipedia entry here), is ostensibly to protect copyrights from pirates. Sounds good.  We respect copyrights — our raison d’être is to provide out-of-copyright images, after all.

But, the devil is in the details. From the reports we read, the terms of the proposed legislation are so broad as to sweep in all sorts of websites, not only the ones targeted (ex-US  pirate sites).

And, talk about over-kill: Internet service providers could ask the US Department of Justice to take a shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach and just block a website if they unilaterally felt it was presenting copyright infringing works. Or, if you run a pay-for site, they could block your payment systems, effectively putting you out of business. This flips the burden of proof to “prove you are innocent” as opposed to, “we presume you are innocent and will prove you guilty.”  Proving a negative (“prove you are not guilty” ) is an impossibility, making this legislation alarming on all sorts of levels.

We get the intent — protecting copyright works.  But this legislation is ham-handed. Not only does it flip the burden of proof to an impossible standard, the limits aren’t rationally related to the proposed purpose of the law to begin with. If we were shut down and felt we were wronged, how would we fight the entire US DoJ? Answer: we wouldn’t. We’d probably put up another site and start over. Or something. And we presume a pirate would do the same thing.  So the draconian policing has no rational basis in solving the problem so stated by the legislative intent. Arrg. Pirates.

Corporations in support of the legislation are mostly from the entertainment industry, but there was also GoDaddy originally. Not surprisingly, the online activists gained steam, and so did a proposal to boycott GoDaddy (“GoDaddy supports SOPA, I’m transferring 51 domains & suggesting a move your domain day ”). As if we needed this in our life, we were going to move our domains out of GoDaddy. On the whole, GoDaddy’s service had noticeably improved since the private equity buy-in, and so we’ve pretty much decided not to move to the cloud. But, we don’t have that many domains, and so we thought we’d just move someplace else, and then think about moving our server or not renewing the contract.

But now, GoDaddy has had a change of heart: “Go Daddy No Longer Supports SOPA – Looks to Internet Community & Fellow Tech Leaders to Develop Legislation We All Support.”  We don’t question if its customers put up a stink. Or if it has to do with monitizing its patents (and if the web is shut down, one can’t collect a royalty, now can one?)

No, in this holiday spirit, we won’t question any motives. We’ll just say thank you GoDaddy brand new one-week CEO for changing you mind on this, whatever the motives. Even if GoDaddy isn’t anti-SOPA, at least it won’t support the legislation in its current form.

We hope this reflects the thought process of the new GoDaddy management better than killing elephants for enjoyment.

PS: We vote that  ”GoDaddy” and its creepy, pornish branding is ditched, and the whole thing  is just rebranded already. How about “Elephant Web” and donate to preserve elephants to both change the creepy name and seek redemption after the awful dead elephant PR?

We have news. About 2000+ new images are uploaded.
YAY.

And now, we’re on the mend.

We had given up, sort of, in disgust last May or so after our last go round with a web professional who didn’t fix the underlying problems before the redesign. And, dear readers, we’re still telling stories about how 5 minutes after we posted our complaint about how we couldn’t get our money back, our web developer was bombarded with 40+ e mails from YOU. <333. We heart our readers. You all are great.

And so, with the money burning a hole in our pocket, we did what any self-respecting web owner would do: We set it aside and stewed. Lacking introspection of any type, we neglected to take ownership in what we could have done better to work with a developer. (Web developer readers are you rolling your eyes, and saying silently, “You and all our other clients?” Mea culpa x 100).

And so, we couldn’t figure out who could help us fix up the site. We first asked our friends what to do. Our ritzy friends sent us to West LA ad agencies. But, the agencies (and no disrespect to their talent for advertising and marketing) asked us what we wanted, and we had no idea, we said, what do you think? They said they thought we should charge for the images. We said no. That pretty much ended that. It’s way too early for ad agencies, when the site didn’t even work properly. Not that it’s not fun to deal with ad agencies. (How come people at ad agencies are so terrific? Maybe it’s because we don’t deal with them all the time, so we didn’t give them time to annoy us. OK, we’re overthinking this.)

And, we asked our investment-club Indian national friend who has actual, successful tech companies. He kindly humored us and referred us to his “tech people” in India. After bouncing around through a couple e-mail loops, we connected with some coders in India. This was actually pretty easy since they have a 408 area code phone number (that’s San Jose, still within the no charge region for us). Plus, the person was very kind, patient, and had lived in San Jose, but said he moved back to India because he was the only son. (We’ve had students, when we’ve taught grad school from time to time, who have been in this predicament. We’re going to visit all of our former students who went back to India one day on one big trip.) We thought it was interesting that at the Moscone not long ago there was a tech job fair not too long ago for jobs in. . . INDIA. Whoa. The world is flat like a Möbius strip.

We digress.

In any event, at some point, the fog cleared and we realized the obvious: we needed to actually learn the technical mumbo jumbo. It’s painful. We’d rather just have a button that says “magically fix everything.” And so, we prepared a slide deck, and then a detailed, 5-page RFP. This went back and forth a couple of times. The payment was to be by milestones, that we clearly defined. Even though we have a contract in writing and all of that, the point is that the site has to work. That was our mistake the first time. The site didn’t work when the redesign was done.

But — and this is key — we had to figure out why the site didn’t work, in order to state that clearly in the RFP.  With trepidation we wondered into the valley of the living dead of MySQL and php.  For those wonkishly inclined, the problem was this:
1. The dedicated server directory structure, holding the image files, could only hold about 1000 images before the server just didn’t work. Some of the directories just had too many images  (and our images are 1MB-2MB, we have about 20000+). We didn’t realize this at all. We used Filezilla to upload images into the directories by month. That would have been fine, but for each image then being resized to thumbnails, medium, etc. So that multiplied the file numbers. So the number of files in the directories had to be reduced by moving the images to new directories. Moving them would mess up the order in the WordPress media library — and that’s why some of the images are just blanks.
2. Uploading to WordPress. The problem is that when we upload the images from the dedicated server to the WordPress media library, the images wouldn’t stay in the directories we created by month — they would then switch somehow (unknown to us) to a single month. So on WordPress there was one big directory containing a number of months. We like WordPress a lot, and really don’t want to move to a different platform.

3. And, to add insult to injury, we had to update to the most recent WordPress version. But, we couldn’t update our WordPress version because we had the wrong php/MySQL version that wouldn’t do the update thingee. We know how to update the php version, but we checked php fora, and all the users said that updating the php would mess up the MySQL database, and you have to update both, which we didn’t know how to do.

Back to India: The RFP went back and forth quite reasonably, and then they asked us to wire a very reasonable amount of upfront money.  We said we’d rather not wire the money, but would prefer to pay by credit card or by check, and could they use PayPal? We never heard back. (This was about 2-3 weeks ago). *Sigh*

So, we started to fix things ourselves, which hasn’t turned into an awful nightmare yet.  We IM’d the dedicated server support and figured out that we could get our dedicated server provider (GoDaddy) to update the php/MySQL for $49.95, significantly less than our India tech. Then we could update the WordPress ourselves.

And then the clouds parted and a golden light shined down on our website. With the new WordPress version we could choose whether to transfer files into the WordPress media library using the current date (the old way, one-big-directory problem) or using the date of the directory (YAY, the date we set up on the dedicated server).  That means that WordPress media library would have the same structure as our dedicated server, hallelujah, it’s a miracle, no coding needed. Sorry folks in India, just completed milestone 1.5.

What we learned: We need to speak the tech mumbo jumbo language and prepare a detailed RFP. There’s no way around it. You have to spell out every little thing. You can’t just say, “this site doesn’t work, fix it.”

Now, ta da, we’ve uploaded all of our images since April 2011 -> November 2011. Many of these we’ve posted as albums on Facebook . We’re in process of organizing the images into the galleries on the different pages here. Plus for some reason, Filezilla lost the meta information, so we have to re-tag each image. Not a big deal, but time-consuming. We still need to go back to our March 2011 directory on the dedicated server, and split out those images into smaller directories, and then re-load those onto WordPress media library. That will probably mess up some of the galleries, so if you see empty squares, that’s what that’s all about.

We’ve also gotten rid of the flash wall galleries. We really thought the flash walls were better than the ordinary click-through galleries because you could glance at all the images all at once. Plus we thought it was a more accurate measure of user engagement — the analytics weren’t geared to page views, but rather time spent on the site. Anyone can get lots of page views by just putting one little thing on a page to force users to click to another page. We think that’s sort of cheating. But, we were the only one who liked the flash walls according to all comments except one or two, and to quote a trusted advisor, “why do you have those stupid flash walls?” We’re not crazy about the gallery format we have now, and we’ll be looking for a better one. We like the format at our beta-site (here). We’ve tried a number of  WordPress gallery plugins, but the trouble is that the images aren’t picked up by SEO when they’re inside some of the galleries.

The next issue is whether to stay on the dedicated server, or move to the cloud. We can’t get a good cost comparison, so we’re staying on the dedicated server for now.  When we did our cloud estimate, we came up with $4000/month. We probably screwed up the calculations since we didn’t know what we were doing. We’ll have to buy more bandwidth, probably, at some point, to make things go faster, but our analytics say that we’re below our limits of data transfer.

Once we’re up to date on the images, which is merely time-consuming rather than a technical impossibility, we’re going to have another go at the landing page and navigation, that everyone also hates but we like. *sigh*

So, dear readers, very best wishes during this holiday season. Print off some images and put them in a nice frame for gifts instead of spending money you don’t have.

Don’t forget to use our image search function: Search the Site

For the images, right click to view/save/open in a new tab, depending on your browser.

Some of our latest favorites:

How about a nice green bird? (Click to go to full size image)

Or a ray?

Kittens are always a crowd pleaser, here’s one for a black and white printer:

Want a new family member? If this photo could talk, what would she say?

More to come, thanks for checking in.

The Drama.

We’re keeping this site open, and in the mean time, rebuilding at vintageprintable.swivelchairmedia.com. We’re going to take the navigation/search functions from this site and rebuild the image bank somewhere else. When it’s all done we’ll point the domain name (“vintageprintable.com”) over there.

Make It Work refunded our money, and has been working with us to untangle this site to rebuild. We wish them well, and so, having achieved our goal of a refund, we depublished our other post.  (That post was our chronicle of experiences in going from a DIY site to one with a professional).

Thank you everyone for your support and kind words.