The National Portrait Gallery is to allow free downloads and non-commercial use of its images, reports Museums Journal. The change means that more than 53,000 low-resolution images are now available free of charge to non-commercial users through a standard Creative Commons licence. More than 87,000 high-resolution images are available for free for academic use through the gallery’s own licence. Users will be invited to give a donation in return for the service.
Tom Morgan, head of rights and reproductions at the NPG, said: “Image licensing is really important to the NPG and across the sector, and we’ve always been keen to carefully manage the balance between what we make available for free and what we charge for"
The NPG joins a growing list of major museums opening up their image collections free of charge.
For more on this see: http://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/news/22082012-npg-changes-image-licensing-to-allow-free-downloads
Comments
Glad to see this long-running bone of contention finally resolved (although the story above doesn't mention it, the impetus for this decision comes from the NPG's dispute with Wikipedia over usage of its images, which began in 2009).
This is something to be celebrated. Would that more institutions would follow suit!