I think this tone "art was created to be viewed" sort of hurts. Painting deteriorates over time when exposed to light and normal air. Also there is a not much difference between painting located in some container, and museum in prohibitively expensive New York.
Rather than advocating against "evil superrich" we should focus on digitization. It should be a law that any piece sold, insured or stored has to digitized in high resolution.
> Also there is a not much difference between painting located in some container, and museum in prohibitively expensive New York.
Indeed.
"At New York’s Museum of Modern Art, 24 of 1,221 works by Pablo Picasso in the institution’s permanent collection can currently be seen by visitors. Just one of California conceptual artist Ed Ruscha’s 145 pieces is on view. Surrealist Joan Miró? Nine out of 156 works.
... The vast majority of art belonging to the world’s top art institutions (and in many countries, their taxpayers) is at any time hidden from public view in temperature-controlled, darkened, and meticulously organised storage facilities. Overall percentages paint an even more dramatic picture: the Tate shows about 20% of its permanent collection. The Louvre shows 8%, the Guggenheim a lowly 3%..."
It's worse than that, lots of art at good publicly owned institutions aren't easily available in high resolution. There aren't any really great central repositories for high resolution scans that are free to use.
I know in Moscow there is an interesting museum called the Pushkin museum which mostly consists of replicas of the worlds famous art. It was actually kinda enjoyable having for instance all the renaissance sculptures of note in one place
The last thing we need is more precedent for government agents entitling themselves to people's private property. You might as well be demanding that every programmer give the government a copy of their source code, in case you die or your company goes bankrupt and people get curious about what you were working on.
> You might as well be demanding that every programmer give the government a copy of their source code, in case you die or your company goes bankrupt and people get curious about what you were working on.
You give that example of hyperbole, but I believe that is quite reasonable. I am of the opinion that if you want your code to have copyright protection, you must have a copy of the source code either available to the public or placed in an escrow service to be made public when the copyright expires.
Copyright is an agreement between authors and society. In exchange for limited protection of the work, the work is not hidden from the public, and can therefore be built upon once the work is in public domain. If the author is not allowing the work to eventually enter the public domain, then the author's side of the agreement is not being upheld, and they should not have copyright protection either.
Copyright is a different matter. These historical artifacts won't have any copyright on them in the first place, and are physically secured to prevent people from seeing them. If somebody snuck in and took pictures, there'd be no reason for the owner to have any control over the resulting pictures(although the trespasser could be prosecuted).
With code, "[..]sold, insured or stored[...]" are the three verbs under consideration. Selling and insuring likely require somebody to look at it, so copyright is somewhat relevant(although you can make them sign an NDA). But that "stored" verb would mean that writing code for your personal or company use with no intention to ever show it to the public is also illegal. So you wouldn't just waive some benefits, but would be fined or jailed if you don't file a copy with the government.
But what if the ancient romans had GNUed code, and you discovered it 1000 years later, and kept it to yourself?
Governments already demand that you give up your intellectual property after a number of years, yet the same concept hasn't been applied to physical property yet.
That's a really good question. I guess code specifically wouldn't be copyrighted after that time and wouldn't have any value in its physical format. I'm also not sure how hard it is to track property ownership over 1000 years, or if it applies between governments. Ancient artifacts whose ownership is in question could be legislated to not transfer ownership to the discoverer; that's not really burdensome. There's also laws regarding abandoned property. If e.g. Stallman was buried with printouts of emacs and a tomb robber steals the copy, the entire chain of transactions is tainted from that point on.
But as painful as it would be to lose it, if you had verifiable proof that the documents the code is printed on were legally yours, you shouldn't be obligated by outside parties to handle them in any particular way.
It's pretty difficult to respect the position of the super rich in this scenario.
At best, they are avoiding taxes with the art. At worst, they are laundering money or hiding treasures plundered from places like Iraq behind a curtain of shell companies and noxious Swiss regulations.
Rather than advocating against "evil superrich" we should focus on digitization. It should be a law that any piece sold, insured or stored has to digitized in high resolution.