The Museum's OASC initiative provides license- and cost-free access to images of artwork in the collection that the Museum believes to be in the public domain and free of other known restrictions for scholarly use in any media which the Museum has identified as Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC) Icon on the site
I don't understand this in two ways.
i) How can the Met claim copyright of reproductive scans of works which are in the public domain?
ii) If the Met provides "license-free" access to images to a certain group of academics, even if we accept that the Met holds a copyright over those images surely the academics are then free to redistribute those images license-free such that they can be used by anyone for any purpose?
I don't really understand what "license-free" means in this context.
i) They can claim what they want, and even if there is no way it would hold up in court, can still discourage people from using what they do have the right to use.
Does anyone know where we can lookup all the legal cases the Met has been involved in? I am wondering if they have ever actually tried to enforce these policies.
I don't understand this in two ways.
i) How can the Met claim copyright of reproductive scans of works which are in the public domain?
ii) If the Met provides "license-free" access to images to a certain group of academics, even if we accept that the Met holds a copyright over those images surely the academics are then free to redistribute those images license-free such that they can be used by anyone for any purpose?
I don't really understand what "license-free" means in this context.