Those of us in the printing industry (especially those who distinctly remember the pre-digital days) are, or should be, extremely vigilant when it comes to reproducing images and documents without permission to do so. Federal law, in the form of US Civil Code 17, dictates this. We can not use ignorance (‘oh, we had no idea’) as an excuse.

For decades, our company has been on high alert ever since a well-intentioned former employee reproduced a set of house plans back in the 90’s without written permission. It was an extremely small order, only 3 sets of 4, for a total of 12 copies 18”x24.” The customer was getting bids from builders for his new home. Sounds innocuous enough, doesn’t it? What was totally overlooked was the bright red copyright seal on all 4 sheets. Hard to miss it but miss it he did. The $10 transaction became a $3000 ‘let’s agree that we should have caught this and settle out of court’ admission .

That expensive embarrassing lesson propelled Copycat into being stewards of the federal law. At the risk of upsetting a prospective customer, if it wasn’t obvious and apparent that the customer had some sort of ownership, we had to ask for written permission to be granted in order for us to reproduce whatever was requested. This was a sticky wicket. We ticked off some folks with our policy but orange jumpsuits and large fines just weren’t our jam. They still aren’t.

So, fast forward to recently when a customer asked us to reproduce an incredibly famous piece by one of the Masters; a part of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s collection. We couldn’t believe someone would have the chutzpah to even ask, regardless of the fact that Cleveland is over 800 miles away and how would the museum ever find out. The customer came back at us with ‘but what about Open Access?’ What about Open Access? . . . what is Open Access?

We researched The Cleveland Museum of Art and Open Access. Here’s the first link we read: https://www.clevelandart.org/open-access

The first paragraph:

The Cleveland Museum of Art is proud to be an Open Access Institution, offering the public the ability to download, share, collaborate, remix, and reuse images of public-domain artworks from the museum’s collection, as well as metadata for the entire collection– all without asking permission. High-resolution images and data related to the CMA’s collection are made available under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) designation.

Umm, wow. Still, that was not enough to satisfy our stringent interpretation of USCS 17. We dug deeper. Several paragraphs down we came across this sentence: The museum encourages those who come to the museum to capture their own still and moving images of public-domain artworks in the CMA’s collection for any purpose — whether scholarly, commercial, or personal — provided they do not disrupt the experience of our other visitors.

The word ‘commercial’ was what we needed to be convinced that we could reproduce the work requested by our customer.

An even deeper dive yielded the astonishing news that everyone who’s anyone in the American art museum world participates in Open Access . . . MoMa, National Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, Smithsonian . . . the list is incredibly extensive. (A quick look at the *Louvre indicates they may be a bit more stringent, allowing reproduction but only for noncommercial use. (*We’re not planning to poke any bears, in case you were wondering.) Apparently, Open Access is not limited to art. Check out this url: https://doaj.org/ There’s all kinds of stuff you can borrow and in a ton of different languages too. #mindblowing

So what does this mean to you? In short, we are more likely to reproduce images once thought to be taboo in the world of printing.
There are obvious taboos such as Disney, Marvel or current sports hero images . . . and we will continue to evaluate on a case-by-case basis (again just say no to steep fines and wearing orange jumpsuits). However, if one of those big houses says it’s on for you to reproduce a piece, we’re all in.

Have you always wanted a wall in your home with a life size image of Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware series of three pieces, as seen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art? We can help you with that! If you’d like to know more about how we can help you, or have any other questions we can answer, click here.