Creative Commons Zero (CC0) enables the public to access thousands of artworks through the ages
The J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles recently announced that more than 88,000 works from its archival collection are available for “download, edit and repurpose… without any legal restrictions.”
The Getty has also reported that since opening access to the public, it has seen “an uptick in image downloads on our site, averaging about 30,000 per month.”
In fact, it’s not the first museum to offer public access to high resolution images of its art collections. Since February 2020, the Smithsonian Institution has 2.8 million digitised images from its multiple museums, research centres, libraries and archives available for free online.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York already has more than 400,000 images accessible to the public; Paris Musées some 320,000 images from the 14 Parisian institutions under its care; and 360,000 images from Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam—that’s more than a third of its overall collection.
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Why does this happen?
This is thanks to the “no rights reserved” copyright under the Creative Commons (CC) licences dubbed “CC0.” It relinquishes all copyright and similar rights the author holds to his or her work and offers those rights to the public domain, allowing anyone and everyone, for better or for worse, to download, share and remix these artworks without facing legal consequences.
Such artwork releases to the public domain have been going on for some time, dating back as early as the 2000s, when we began to see copyright laws of previously protected artworks expiring, having exhausted its mandated lifespan of up to 70 years, depending on the country.
There are plenty of opportunities to go down the rabbit hole exploring what these museums can offer, but here are a few lesser-known artworks available for public download that you may not know about.
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