The Met's online library contains almost half a million works of art that you can download free of charge

When you are looking for art – and I'm talking fine Art, with a capital “A” – the Metropolitan Museum is the place where it can be found. And you can not only visit the museum when you are in New York (to look at art), but also almost half a million digital pictures of real works approved by Snobs from the online archives of the Museum-free free of charge.

The MET accommodate 492,000 high-resolution images, most of which are public domain. You can therefore use them for every non-commercial purpose-from printing a T-shirt with James Johnston von Straiton to remind a poster of the saint's penit.

How to download art from the online collection of the metropolitan

If you bring your gloves to this sweet, sweet art, it cannot be easier:

• Click this link T on the MET collection.

• Browse the different sections to find one that appeals to you.

• Click the painting, the sculpture or the chest of your choice.

• Search for the “Oa public domain”Day, as you can see in the following picture by Marie Emilie Coignet de Courson with your dog. This means that it is available under the open access initiative of the MET, and you can use it free of charge (as long as it is for a non-commercial purpose).

How “Public -Domain” calculation influences the paintings in museums

When I search the collection of Met of Met, I thought about who really has art. The answer is somehow difficult: that Physical objects (Paintings, sculptures, lyres from human skulls) are in the possession of the museum itself. The intellectual property (What art shows) at first belongs to her creator, but finally to everyone: In the USA, ownership of IP goes back to the public domain – it does not belong to anyone/all – 95 years after the work of the author, or 70 years after the author's death, when the work was created before 1978.

The rights to one Image created from a work of art (or something else) Is a separate thing: of course who has taken the photo, you have the photo until 70 years after his death. You can visit the museum yourself and take a photo of public work and use it as you want, but the mead has the rights to the uploaded images. You just decided to pass on these rights to someone who does not spend Buck out of his work.