Some free image use from NPG
August 23 2012
Picture: NPG, Van Dyck's portrait of Kenelm Digby, c.1640
Excellent news that the NPG has decided to relax its image charging policy for academic use. More details in the Museums Journal:
[...] more than 87,000 high-resolution images are available for free for academic use through the gallery’s own licence. Users will be invited to give a donation in return for the service.
Tom Morgan, head of rights and reproductions at the NPG, said: “Image licensing is really important to the NPG and across the sector, and we’ve always been keen to carefully manage the balance between what we make available for free and what we charge for.
“Obviously this is quite complex – on one hand, if people are making money from a museum’s content then it’s right the museum should share that profit but we also want to support academic and education activity. So we took the opportunity to look at the way in which we could deliver this service and automate it.”
The gallery previously charged for the use of high-resolution images. It reported £334,000 in revenue from reproduction rights in 2011/12. Following costs of £222,000, this left a profit of £112,000.
Margins on licensing sales at the NPG have increased from 13% in 2009/10 to 34% in the last financial year.
£222,000 a year to police and process reproduction rights? That's a lot. I suspect that relaxing the rules further and allowing full access to high-resolution images on the NPG site (as they do at Yale) might, in the long-term, be worth more than £112,000 p.a. More people would use the site, more people would get enthused by portraits, and more people would go the gallery. The NPG could still make an income by adding the proviso that commercial publications should contact the gallery to pay for reproductions - I bet that almost all publishing houses would cough up.
