The Met frees 375,000 public-domain images under CC0 open access

The Metropolitan Museum of Art had spent 147 years building one of the world's great encyclopedic collections — 1.5 million objects spanning 5,000 years — and had digitized and photographed it for over a century. But its 2014 Open Access for Scholarly Content allowed reuse only for non-commercial study, while commercial and general use still ran through Art Resource licensing fees.

On February 7, 2017 the Met announced a new model: every image of a public-domain artwork — more than 375,000 high-resolution scans — was released under Creative Commons Zero, waiving all copyright claims. Anyone could copy, share, remix and sell the images without asking permission, and basic catalogue data for 440,000 digitized works was published on GitHub for developers.

The museum treated the release as a distribution problem, not a charity gesture. It partnered with Creative Commons, Wikimedia, Artstor, the Digital Public Library of America and Pinterest, and hosted a Wikimedian-in-Residence to move the collection onto Wikipedia and its sister projects. Digital director Loic Tallon said the museum's audience was not only its 6.7 million visitors but the three billion internet-connected people who would never walk through its doors.

Open Access changed what the collection was for: images became raw material for products, education, art and research, and other institutions followed the pattern the Met's page now lists as peer organizations — Cooper Hewitt, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art and the Smithsonian. The portal has since grown past 492,000 open images, with an API and 3D models built on the same release.