The Met Expands Access to Images of Artworks

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is making images of all its public-domain artworks -- more than 375,000 pieces -- available for unrestricted use. The museum said on Tuesday that it is using the Creative Common Zero (CC0) designation, a legal tool that essentially waives a copyright owner's rights, to facilitate the change. The decision means anyone can use the images (such as this one of Pierre-Auguste Renoir's Madame Georges Charpentier and Her Children) for any purpose, whether for educational or even commercial reasons. The Met also announced several partnerships on Tuesday to make the images widely available, including with the Digital Public Library of America, Wikimedia and Ithaka, which will make the images searchable in the Artstor digital library. The Met in 2014 made the images available for noncommercial use.