[NetBehaviour] 1840's GIF Party Tate Open

[Rob Myers]

On 21/01/14 07:52 AM, Seth Guy wrote:
> May interest some of
> you: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/special-event/1840s-gif-party-call-submissions

This is an amazing project artistically but Tate need to do some work on
their image copyright policy.

Specifically the tumblr requires that you:

"ensure that any third party copyrighted material contained in a
submitted work has already been cleared with the copyright holder."

But the Tate website says:

"You may not copy, reproduce, republish, disassemble, decompile, reverse
engineer, download, post, broadcast, transmit, make available to the
public, or otherwise use tate.org.uk content in any way except for your
own personal, non-commercial use.  In certain prescribed circumstances,
you may adapt, alter or create a derivative work from any tate.org.uk
content for your own personal, non-commercial use, with the prior
written permission of Tate which will be indicated against the relevant
tate.org.uk content."

This applies to the Tate's dubious practice (sadly common among UK
museums) of claiming copyright on reproductions of out-of-copyright
paintings, which includes the paintings that are being used as source
material for this project.

(Also of relevance is the Tate website's terms disallowing:

"Reproduction of Tate website content on any social media platforms,
except where other terms allow"

I'm not sure the project page counts as "terms".)

Having required you to both accept and break their hallucinated
copyrights, and promise not to use the resulting work publicly or as
part of your artistic livelihood, Tate then require that you:

"grant Tate a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual royalty-free licence
to reproduce, modify, edit, publish and distribute the content you submit"

At least unlike the Tate site the tumblr doesn't require that:

"You also grant to Tate the right to sub-licence these rights to third
parties."

The solution to this iniquitous morass is that Tate should place all the
images that they can under a Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike
license. They can then receive adaptations under the same terms in
return, including the adaptations they are calling for in this project.

- Rob.