A picture is worth a thouand dollars

April 16, 2023 8:06 AM

Who owns history? How remarkable historical footage is hidden and monetised (18m video docu)
posted by daksya (9 comments total)

Plenty of other companies, archives, museums, libraries license their films and footage for commercial use (as in feature films, documentaries, advertising etc.) while still having these films to watch on their websites and even at their various locations.
You can watch just about anything Getty holds on their website (not everything is digitized, alas.) You can create an account for free.

“Hidden” is not an accurate term, despite what the Aeon writer claims. Almost no footage vendor charge fees to view unless the film isn’t transferred or digitized. I work as an archival producer, mainly in documentary, and know whereof I post. Usage fees depend on terms, territory, types of use, etc..
Misek isn’t an experienced documentarian despite being a college prof. And of course, there’s no link at which to see his film.
posted by Ideefixe at 9:28 AM on April 16, 2023 [7 favorites]

> And of course, there’s no link at which to see his film.

The entire video is embedded on that page.
posted by daksya at 9:34 AM on April 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

Small commercial film vendor rescues old films. Being able to monetize old footage makes it a lot easier to preserve these old films.
And thanks for the update!
posted by Ideefixe at 9:38 AM on April 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

Hmmm, as eye-opening as this is for me, it still mostly says THAT footage is "hidden", not HOW.

Does Getty Images only rely on people not shopping around, or are there other things at work? If there are other things, do they just arise from the nature of the internet, difficulty of searching or whatever, or are they deliberate things, like obscuring the free versions somehow?

Nefarious rent-seeking would be interesting, but I'd also be interested if it only arises from market conditions, less salacious as that would be.

And Ideefixe: I get that just watching the stuff is free (with a big fat watermark?), but if it's in the public domain, why is there a usage fee at all?
posted by Rich Smorgasbord at 10:12 AM on April 16, 2023

I’m reminded the human genome (or all the sequencing data that came after) is free simply due to the timing. There was not an established private (for profit) method to make large data sets available upon scientific publication (i.e. scientific journals), the internet was young and naïve, and the correct like-minded people in positions of power felt “you can’t own the human genome.” They built a structure to do it: NCBI. As time went along public publication just became the standard, now it’s a requirement of most scientific publications to make sequences available on NCBI (or a similar platform, though NCBI is the standard). Though abstruse to navigate, ANYONE with an internet connection can access and search ACGTUs, from axolotl to zebrafish.

There’s an argument to be made that we need to pay archivists, storage and maintenance fees to care for all this archival material. If it protects the history for posterity (or, even better, gets it out there) great! If that’s a for profit model to diversify our protection portfolio, fine. Google has digitized whole libraries behind their own paywalls for their own profit models.
But maybe we’d benefit more from the NCBI model and convert that profit into an expansion of governmental archives into the contemporary era with their own free public access servers, digital archivists, and digitizers. Can’t both sides of the aisle get behind memorializing the glorious past?

Future download link (summer 2023) from the video.


Great post! Incredible footage.
posted by rubatan at 10:19 AM on April 16, 2023 [3 favorites]

I’ve always thought it was weird that museums claim copyright over images of paintings hundreds of years old that they possess.
posted by njohnson23 at 11:24 AM on April 16, 2023

I think some kind of fair and reasonable licensing scheme would be useful for purposes of encouraging preservation and accessibility of digital media. I’m not sure we have that today.
posted by interogative mood at 1:34 PM on April 16, 2023 [2 favorites]

I’ve always thought it was weird that museums claim copyright over images of paintings hundreds of years old that they possess.

To be perfectly clear, many museums do make such claims, but they are lying. Reproductions (e.g. photos, prints, scans) of public-domain artworks are not copyrightable. For US case law, see Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp.
posted by mbrubeck at 8:35 PM on April 16, 2023 [1 favorite]

njohnson23 The museums claim copyright to the photos and reproductions of those paintings, not the paintings themselves, but some artists’ estates are very protective—Monet’s, for example.
Artists Rights Society.
RichS, not all of those clips or films repped by Getty are in the public domain, nor were most of the clips used in the short linked at Aeon.
posted by Ideefixe at 8:04 PM on April 17, 2023