Page 29 - Unlikely Stories 2

VERONICA

coffee mugs, stationery, and all manner of everyday household and
gift items with those logos or names or images imprinted upon them.
Fashion has made it acceptable to display corporate indicia upon
one’s personal accoutrements, and the corporations are happy to
provide those items—or, more commonly, license the rights to a
manufacturer. Museums are no exception to this: we make a good
part of our revenue now from our shop, which has branches in
suburban shopping malls. And here is where we come to the
intersection of art, technology, and business.”
Sir Payne leaned forward; his hearing was deficient, but he
would permit no prosthetic.
“There are millions of potential customers out there, people
who will pay, directly or indirectly through their online provider, for
an image of an artwork. An image, I should add, they will be able to
interact with—that is, with which they may play around. Just as they
cannot simply read a text any longer, the experience of viewing a
painting on a museum wall is being replaced by the capability of
zooming in on bits of it, distorting it, changing it on a monitor screen
in any way the viewer desires: adding, subtracting, multiplying—all
the wonderful things a digital computer can do. It is not for the
museum professional to judge this revolution in art appreciation; our
duty, rather, is to protect the rights conferred upon us by ownership
of the works being distributed so readily over electronic networks.”
“Damned right!” said Sir Payne with asperity. “Property rights are
the foundation of civilization!”
“I felt you would understand that, sir. The problem with
protecting the image of a painting is purely technical, and has been
recently resolved by a software company with which the National
Museum has been in negotiations for some time. This difficulty, in a
legal sense, depends on proving any given transmitted image is based
on an authorized copy of the original rather than an imitation over
which the original owner has no rights. For example, one can find Da
Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” used on hundreds of products—but are those
images taken from the original, or are they approximations made by a
contemporary illustrator, different enough to avoid litigation?
Assuming, of course, the Louvre were interested in protecting its
property.”
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