Being an art blogger, I get a lot of unsolicited Email newsletters about art. One of these comes from a website, Art Knowledge News, that just sent out an Email letting everyone know that they’ve uploaded 8000 images to Flickr, basically a full dump of every image ever hosted on their website, complete with caption. Seems easy, just dump all of the images on your site for easy reference?
But here’s the rub – many of the images have copyright information in the actual image, indicating that the image is copyrighted by another party such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, Elizabeth Catlett and scores of other individuals and entities. I’d presume that they source their images from the institutions and individuals they cover, but I highly doubt that those entities have given wholesale permission for AKN to distribute the images further on Flickr… I could be wrong here, but it looks like someone has just stepped on a number of toes.
Technorati Tags: Art Knowledge News, Flickr, art, copyright