Art Museum Image Consortium Artists' Frequently Asked Questions

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What is AMICO?
AMICO (Italian for "friend" and pronounced like "amigo") is the Art Museum Image Consortium, a unique collaboration of art-collecting institutions. Together, they've formed a not-for-profit organization to enable educational use of their digital multimedia documentation.

Who are AMICO's Members?
Any organization with a collection of art can be an AMICO Member. Membership will grow over time to include institutions of many types from around the world. AMICO's founding members are 23 art museums in North America:

Albright-Knox Art Gallery Art Gallery of Ontario Art Institute of Chicago Asia Society Gallery Center for Creative Photography Cleveland Museum of Art Davis Museum and Cultural Center,   Wellesley College Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco George Eastman House J. Paul Getty Museum Los Angeles County Museum of Art

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Minneapolis Institute of Arts Montreal Museum of Fine Arts Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal Museum of Fine Arts, Boston National Gallery of Canada National Museum of American Art Philadelphia Museum of Art San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art San Francisco Museum of Modern Art San Jose Museum of Art Walker Art Center

What is The AMICO Library?
The AMICO Library is the compilation of digital multimedia documentation of works of art contributed by AMICO members. The beta Library contains documentation of about 20,000 works, from ancient to contemporary times. This will grow over time to include hundreds of thousands of works from all cultures and periods.

Who has Access to The AMICO Library?
Only authorized users have access to The AMICO Library, for educational purposes. Users include teachers, students, curators, museum visitors, scholars and artists.

How is The AMICO Library Made Available?
The full AMICO Library is not available on the public World Wide Web. Only authorized users have access to it through secure electronic distribution systems. To make people aware of the Library, small images and brief text descriptions of all works are available publicly at www.amico.org.

Do Users Pay to Gain Access?
Educational institutions are charged a fee to have access to The AMICO Library. This partially pays the costs of distributing the Library. Museums themselves pay the costs of digitizing works of art, and pay membership dues to AMICO.

Will Anyone Make a Profit from AMICO?
No. Commercial use of The AMICO Library or any Works that it contains is not allowed. AMICO's goals are educational, and non-profit. We want to make art, including contemporary works, available for study in educational institutions.

To find out more, contact AMICO at the address below:

AMICO, 2008 Murray Ave, Suite D, Pittsburgh, PA, 15206
www.amico.org   email: info@amico.org
phone: +1 412 422 8533   fax: +1 412 422 8549

Why do AMICO Members Ask Artists for Rights?
Many Contemporary Artists still hold copyright in the works they've created. To make images and documentation of works in their collection available for educational use, AMICO members need artists' permissions.

What Rights do AMICO Members Want?
Artists are asked to give a non-exclusive, limited license to AMICO members to use reproductions of their works for educational purposes. These include making regular contributions to The AMICO Library. AMICO Members ask for the right to reproduce the work (make a digital image), distribute copies of it (as part of the Library), publicly display it (e.g. project it in a class-room), and to create derivative works based on it.

Why Do AMICO Members Make Derivative Works?
In order to distribute The AMICO Library, many different sizes of digital image are needed. Each one of these could be considered a derivative. We need artists' permission to do this.

Can Users Make Adaptations of an Artist's Work?
Yes. AMICO Agreements allow users to make certain kinds of modifications to the images in The AMICO Library. For example, a teacher could draw a diagram over a painting to illustrate its composition, a student could incorporate a work into a larger multimedia project, or a researcher could crop details from images to compare works of art. Adaptations can't be redistributed.

What About Artists' Moral Rights?
AMICO Members respect the moral rights of artists. These are: the right of attribution, to be acknowledged as the creator of a work; the right to prevent misuse of an artist's name, as creator of a work s/he didn't make, or of a work that has been distorted, or modified in a manner prejudicial to the artist's honor or reputation; and the right of integrity, to prevent intentional distortion or modification prejudicial to the artist's honor or reputation, and to prevent the destruction of a work of recognized stature. AMICO's agreements identify these rights, require designated users to respect them and ask that subscrib-ing institutions have electronic information use policies and educate users about intellectual property rights.

Can Works in The AMICO Library by Published?
No. AMICO Agreements prevent the redistribution of the content of the Library, either through traditional publication or via the World Wide Web. Publishing requires separate permission.

Can Artists Have Access to The AMICO Library?
Contemporary Artists affiliated with subscribing institutions can have access through them. Unaffiliated artists, whose works are represented in the Library, can have access to the entire Library through an AMICO Member.

Contact AMICO at info@amico.org for more information.

Last modified on  October 10, 2001