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British Museum makes lost Hokusai drawings available online

smithsonianmag.com

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Re: British Museum makes lost Hokusai drawings available online

#4

Link (collection search) to the drawings: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/search?keyword=Banb...

For those who can't read Chinese ('Kanji'), some of the portraits cover Vietnam, Yunnan, China, India, Korea, Thailand, Mongolia and the Philippines as well as Japan. Possibly also some other areas in northeast Asia, I am unclear on the period terminology. As they are dated 1820s but seem to use Chinese terms from earlier periods, I guess this was an adaptation of an earlier set of Chinese descriptive texts or (heresy to suggest!) images that had been carried to Japan. But that's just supposition.

Re: British Museum makes lost Hokusai drawings available online

#6
post #5

Wow, really unfortunate these are locked under copyright of "The Trustees of the British Museum" ([1] for example). [1] https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/image/1613716997

Not really, the copyright on the photograph will always belong to the photographer. The image is available under creative commons for non-commercial use, which seems fair enough.

Re: British Museum makes lost Hokusai drawings available online

#7
post #5

Wow, really unfortunate these are locked under copyright of "The Trustees of the British Museum" ([1] for example). [1] https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/image/1613716997

Not really, the copyright on the photograph will always belong to the photographer. The image is available under creative commons for non-commercial use, which seems fair enough.

Sadly, the images for non-commercial use appear to be restricted to a medium resolution with high JPEG compression artifacts [1].

As an example I downloaded the image https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/image/1613717051 (~1 MB, 2500x1973).

Still good enough for many use cases, but it limits personal prints.

[1] https://www.britishmuseum.org/terms-use/copyright-and-permis...

Re: British Museum makes lost Hokusai drawings available online

#8
post #5

Wow, really unfortunate these are locked under copyright of "The Trustees of the British Museum" ([1] for example). [1] https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/image/1613716997

Not really, the copyright on the photograph will always belong to the photographer. The image is available under creative commons for non-commercial use, which seems fair enough.

Not necessarily. There has to be a “a significant expenditure of labour”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow#United_Kingd...

Re: British Museum makes lost Hokusai drawings available online

#9
post #3

Would love to get my hands on traditional woodblock prints of the Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji...

There's a gallery in New York that specialises in ukiyo-e. The most notable original Hokusai prints are not cheap, but some of the work is surprisingly affordable. (And some isn't.)

There's also vintage woodblock porn, for those who like that kind of thing.

Re: British Museum makes lost Hokusai drawings available online

#10
post #5

Wow, really unfortunate these are locked under copyright of "The Trustees of the British Museum" ([1] for example). [1] https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/image/1613716997

This doesn't seem like it should be true, even if they claim it.

" In 2019, the European Union adopted the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. Article 14 of the directive states that reproductions of works of visual art that are in the public domain cannot be subject to copyright or related rights, unless the reproduction is an original creative work "

and on the digitisation of those:

" UK Intellectual Property Office confirmed that digital reproductions of public domain images are not protected by copyright, arguing that "according to the Court of Justice of the European Union which has effect in UK law, copyright can only subsist in subject matter that is original in the sense that it is the author's own "intellectual creation". Given this criterion, it seems unlikely that what is merely a retouched, digitised image of an older work can be considered as "original"." "

Presumably works from the early 19th C are out of copyright?

That said, I am all for supporting the BM- it is an amazing institution..

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