The British Library is still one Flickr away from making all art free | Art and design | theguardian.com

"The British Library may have pushed at a bigger door than it knows. Britain's pre-eminent research library has just put a million images from its collections on to Flickr. These pictures are free not just to browse but to use and reuse: the library even wants members of the public to research them in an experiment in crowdsourced history. Which is all great fun – but it raises massive questions about whether it is ethical to copyright or restrict the publication of any historical art, ever. The images set free by the British Library come from books published between the 17th and 19th centuries, but they do not include masterpieces. They are curiosities. A collagist like Max Ernst could have a lot of fun pasting them together to create surreal fantasies – and perhaps that is exactly what the internet will do with these steampunk exotica. But let's be clear what the British Library has NOT done. It has not offered free use of its real visual treasures. You won't find its Leonardo da Vinci manuscript in this public archive, or the Lindisfarne Gospels. The images that have been released are the kind of curios that have for many years been published by companies like Dover for free use. This big bold act of generosity only scratches the surface. When will holders of great art recognise that it now circulates freely online, and stop charging print publishers, authors, magazines and newspapers for its use? Every time one of Leonardo da Vinci's anatomical drawings from the Royal Collection is published in a book, the Queen gets a pay day. Every time a historian puts a picture by, say, Hogarth in a book, the owner of the original – it might be the Tate, say, or the National Gallery – collects a considerable fee. This is true of all works of art regardless of when they were made: I have personally forked out for paintings that predate 1500. The British Library's brave move implicitly recognises the absurdity of this kind of pictorial restriction in the digital age. It invites the question: why not put everything into the public domain for free – even the Leonardos? One institution that leads the way may seem unlikely – it is Nasa ..."