The De-Valuation of Art?

[JonHop]

Well I just noticed on deviant art here - Getty-Liberation-of-Masterpieces-as-Open-Content and read the article and first thought well thats great for us to study etc but then there is this part 'The museum is literally “beaming up” the great works in its collection as living resources within the arts themselves, for study, for sheer personal pleasure and, remarkably, as free visual resources available to any artist or business anywhere for anything and for free!'

So potentially any company could use the art from these images in any profitable way that they want and this in turn means they no longer would need to pay an artist for original work.

I really feel like this is devaluing what we do as artists, for study purposes this would be great but they are making the HD images available for any use without asking for permission or needing to pay them anything.

With the companies already trying to 'farm' artists and their ideas with competitions (sometimes the winner is not even paid they just get to see their work on a vehicle or something like that, and the companies usually own the rights to all work submitted) I just feel like this is the next step in that cycle.

I would like to know what are the other daggers thoughts on this.

So what do you think about this daggers?

[Psychotime]

This is just giving an outlet to download from the public domain that was already there to begin with. You're reacting to the idea of people having free use to an old work without any need for permission, but that's exactly how the public domain works, and it is FAR from anything new.

Ever seen MST3K? The majority of the movies they watched were in the public domain, because they were free to use.

It's very nice to be able to download an HD file of Van Gogh work for free. He's LONG dead and whether it was payed for or not, there's no way any of that money will ever go to him.

Anyone could already use his images for free in the first place, the museum just decided to give away free HD files.

[JonHop]

No I've never heard of MST3K (I don't live under a rock, promise lol).

Hmmm You make some valid points Psycho, I was probably just overreacting to this really. After seeing a lot of people trying to hire artists on the online freelance sites for 3-5 dollars per illustration 'depending on quality' and companies trying to exploit artists online (I know not all companies or people do this).

[Psychotime]

There IS alot of garbage going on with shady people trying to abuse artists. No argument there.

The public domain isn't really related, though. And given the measures companies like Disney took to prevent their works from entering the public domain, businesses want copyright law to favor them as much as possible. They'd destroy the idea of a public domain if they could.