A COPYRIGHT-CONTROLLED falls firmly in the realm of fair dealing, Britain’s MUSEUM IS A CRIME AGAINST equivalent of the United States’ fair use. All right, the curator admitted. It’s not really
HUMANKIND. copyrighted per se, but we want to be the exclusive
purveyors of photos and picture-postcards and so
forth. What’s more, some of the exhibits are on loan
from third parties who made us promise to prohibit T HIS PAST AUGUST, MY PARENTS CAME their being photographed. to visit me in London, and we had a grand There’s no nice way to say this: a museum sightseeing day that culminated in a visit curator who takes this attitude to the exhibits in to the Royal Greenwich Observatory, where clever her charge is a traitor to history, to heritage, and makers in the 17th and 18th centuries made to science. The point of a museum is to spread homebrew instruments to measure their physical culture, not restrict it in order to run a penny-ante environments, sensor arrays so clever that they picture-postcard racket. A museum curator should enabled sailors anywhere in the world to divine not accept an unphotographable exhibit of historic their longitude. This was the scientific and military interest any more than she should accept an exhibit problem of the day, because sailors who can’t calculate their longitude can’t reliably cross oceans. “A wise steward of David Today, the Greenwich Observatory is given over to a brilliant museum that tracks the history of this would take every paleo-maker initiative. There are the most cunning brass clocks, handwritten logbooks in the crabbed conceivable measure script of Royal Astronomers centuries dead, and to see that this piece towering, proud telescopes built of wood and hand-polished optics. of world heritage was And the first sign you see when you go through the door says “NO PICTURES.” There’s even a picture spread to every corner of a camera in a red circle with a slash through it. of the globe.”
The temple of measurement demands that it not be measured. The museum that is supposed that comes with the condition that patrons who to inspire a generation of scientists demands that wish to see it must swear a loyalty oath, view a pro-the most basic tools of science — recording devices paganda film, stand on one foot, or accept any other — be kept in our pockets. abridgment of their personal and cognitive liberty.
I went and asked a curator why this was: was it However, this attitude toward curatorship is fast because they’re worried about flash pictures fading becoming the norm, not the exception. For exam-the exhibits? No — photons don’t hurt old brass, ple, when the Florentine curators who control access no matter how precisely machined. The curator to Michelangelo’s David allowed Stanford to under-said that there’s no photography allowed in the take a high-resolution 3D scan of the famous sculp-Greenwich Observatory because of copyright! ture, it was on the condition that the resulting 3D
Copyright? How can that be? There’s no such files be restricted with Digital Rights Management thing as a copyright on a clock. There’s certainly technology to prevent their use in making copies of no copyright in centuries-old logbooks; facts aren’t the David that were outside of Florentine control. copyrightable, and copyright runs out in substan- The David is not copyrighted. It is a centuries-tially less than a couple hundred years — besides, old artifact that is part of the world’s heritage. It the photographing of a single page out of a logbook does not “belong” to a museum any more than the
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