One way to look at it is that allowing commercial use allows people to create monetary value around your work in a decentralized way, and some of that value finds its way back to you. When people have to ask permission first, that vastly cuts down on the number of people who make any commercial use at all, so getting 100% of the remaining commercial use may not be as valuable as getting a smaller percentage of a much wider pool.

Of course, that sounds very hand-wavy. For some actual data, see http://questioncopyright.org/sita_distribution , which describes what happened when one particular artist decided to permit commercial use. (Of course, she’s an individual artist, not a museum, so the comparison will be inexact, but it at least shows that permitting commercial use can still lead to economic value for the licensor.)

There’s also something to be said for helping artists generally, by allowing them to derive commercial value from reusing/remixing existing works, of course! :-) It’s precisely because the museum is non-commercial that it is in a good position to allow others to make commercial use. It would make much more sense to restrict commercial use if the museum itself were a commercial entity; given that it’s not, any restriction on reuse in some sense contradicts the museum’s mission.

I’m sure much of this came up during your internal discussions, of course, and I wouldn’t expect major policy changes to come from a blog comment thread. I’m just trying to throw some ideas out there for the next time you’re considering the policy.

Best,
-Karl

This is a really good question and it’s something we talked about in depth internally. At the end of the day, the museum is a non-commercial entity and as such, we don’t feel comfortable (yet) with allowing for blanket commercial use in cases where we own the copyright to the image. In some ways this is a shame, but in other ways we still have to consider that image licensing is something that we generate revenue from and that’s not a revenue stream we are comfortable giving up just yet. I say “yet” because since 2004 we had a default CC-BY-NC-ND on our site and have just now gone one more step in the direction of opening up content to a CC-BY-NC. Six years ago, we couldn’t stomach the idea of derivatives, but since then we’ve had a very good experience online with artists wanting to use our images for mashups of their own and we recognize that folks need to be able to crop and manipulate images for their own site design and reuse. The great thing about CC is the modular structure, so we’ve been able to allow for greater re-use while still respecting the current concerns that we consider important. That may change one day and CC makes it really easy for us to do so!

Amalyah Keshet
Head of Image Resources & Copyright Management
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Chair, MCN IP SIG