The J. Paul Getty Museum Website
The virtual collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum is devoted to Greek, Roman, and Etruscan antiquities; Neolithic clay figures; as well as drawings, manuscripts, paintings, photographs, sculptures, and decorative arts from Middle Ages to 20th-century Europe. It also showcases international photography from its origin to today.
Regarding copyright terms, the site has a page entitled: Open Content Program, which contains the site’s rights statement. Based on its description, this site expresses their desire to provide ease-of-access to the more than 100,000 high-resolution images to researchers, students, artists, and art enthusiasts for the diverse types of creative activities.
By viewing an image, such as “Euclid” by Ribera, we can see the specifics of this image, including its right of usage.
On this page, right underneath the electronic copy of the image, we can clearly see the following statement: “This image is available for download, without charge, under the Getty’s Open Content Program.” Which means, any person interested in downloading this image, can do so without asking for permission from The Getty.
For images that are not available for download, there are three main reasons provided by the Getty for this lack of access: privacy issues tied to people represented in the image, contractual responsibilities related to the Getty’s distribution mechanism, or copyright licensing being held by third parties.
In the case of the descriptive section of “Euclid”, which includes the provenance of the original work by Ribera, as well as contextual details revolving around this making of this painting, is followed by this statement: “The text on this page is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License Meaning, we can share this image in any medium or format provided to us, as well as adapt it for any purpose. As far as public domain images, even though these have not been approve by the Getty for unrestricted access and use, they can be dowloaded for various purposes. All they ask is that the user makes sure there are no restrictions on these digital renditions of original work, per third-party rights.
The Iris which is the blog project of the J. Paul Getty Trust, encompasses a community of curators, educators, scholars, students, and digital humanists, all interested in engaging in dialogues pertaining to different aspects revolving around art, such as, history, conservation, scholarship, and hermeneutics.
Great news for art fans: The more than 1,000 blog posts are made accessible to the community through the CC attribution license, for any copying and modifying of text, so as long as we give attribution to the original post. The Iris site is very inviting to questions, comments, and critiques.
