As part of its mission to advocate for posting more government information online, Public.Resource.Org (http://public.resource.org/) is challenging the copyrights asserted on images held and sold by the Smithsonian Institution.

Instead of suing the Smithsonian, the group has downloaded over 6,000 images from the Smithsonian's intricate website and has posted them on Flickr at http://www.flickr.com/photos/publicresourceorg/, claiming that most are public domain images.

        

Left: Clark, Gruber & Co., Denver, 20 Dollar Coin, 1860. Tom Mulvaney (Smithsonian Institution). Right: Cone Headed Grasshopper (Acrididae) from the Insect Zoo at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History. Chip Clark (Smithsonian Institution)

Carl Malamud, co-founder of Public.Resource.Org, claims the Smithsonian has no copyright over most of the images, yet the Smithsonian site carries copyright notices and warnings that, he said, discourage people from using historic images that should be publicly available.

The images on Flickr are mostly fairly low-resolution, with the Smithsonian's watermark discreetly placed in a corner. They do carry some metadata. There is also a collection of high-resolution Muybridge cyanotypes (see http://www.flickr.com/photos/publicresourceorg/sets/72157600218950896/)

Eadweard Muybridge (Smithsonian Institution) Cyanotype proof from Animal Locomotion Series, 1884-1886.

The images have also been loaded into contact sheets and formatted for printing as an e-book, available for free download at: http://stores.lulu.com/publicresource.

The goals of this action are spelled out on the Public.Resource.Org website: first, to clarify what within the Smithsonian's holdings are in the public domain and can be freely used by anyone; second, to easily make available those images that are obviously within the public domain; and third, to encourage the Smithsonian to adopt a policy for on-line distribution more aligned to its mission.

This action comes at a time when several museums are considering various ways to more effectively share images under their care that are in the public domain. See for example Ken Hamma's 2005 DLib article, "Public Domain Art in an Age of Easier Mechanical Reproducibility" and the RLG working group on Museum Collections Sharing.