Dear all,
Echoing Naomi's email, this is one of the fundamental principles which led us to make the change from MDA to the Collections Trust.
The place for this discussion as at the intersection between technologists, legal experts, managers, accountants and marketers. In the absence of such a focus, this discussion tends to be (has already been) repeated in each community separately, and each time with a slightly different set of assumptions about the needs, priorities and potential contribution of those 'other' communities.
As Naomi says, this conversation has been had (many times) in copyright world. It has been had in Europe. It is being had nationally as part of discussions about standards and development. It is being had in Government in the context of rationalising cultural organisations.
Copyright is the key to navigating this situation intelligently instead of simply blundering through it. Setting aside copyright law, a genuinely intelligent approach to licensing enables us to satisfy most of our wishes, and the needs of our users, at the same time.
Licensing can direct the same piece of content to be freely available, mashable etc in some circumstances, and locked-down and paid for in others. It's not an either/or and the 'set it free' militancy and wanton application of irrevocable open content licenses like Creative Commons fundamentally undermines our ability as a sector to take control of what we want people to do, and what we don't.
The tension is clear - on the one hand, Government and the Treasury are talking about museums becoming more innovative and risky. The implication is that there will be less public investment available, so museums are going to have to become more commercially-oriented (speaking recently with a Government officer, whose comment was 'museums need to start thinking like businesses, before they don't have a choice').
Technology world has engendered a number of new business models, which we have pored over in previous discussions on this list. While I do believe that there is scope for some of these models to provide sustainable income (both economic and in the form of public value) for museums, the upfront message is 'freedom', 'open', 'set the content free' - which apparently undermines the more business-minded messages coming through from Government.
The fact is that we are talking about a whole different industry model. Our economy used to be based on venues and objects. It is now based on publishing. Technology certainly provides one of the mechanisms by which our published content is brought to market, but actually making the whole process sustainable depends on a rock-solid foundation of marketing, business modelling, financial management and licensing.
We need to have the conversation holistically, or we run the risk of fundamentally undermining our own position.
Nick
Nick Poole
Chief Executive
Collections Trust
www.collectionstrust.org.uk
www.collectionslink.org.uk
www.cuturalpropertyadvice.gov.uk
Tel: 01223 316028
Fax: 01223 364658
Until the end of April 2008, the Collections Trust's legal trading name is: MDA (Europe) Ltd
Company Registration No: 1300565
Reg. Office: 22 Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 1JP.
The Collections Trust believes that everybody, everywhere should have the right to access and benefit from cultural collections. Our aim is to develop programmes and standards which help connect people and culture.
The Collections Trust was launched from its predecessor body, the MDA, in March 2008.
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Naomi Korn
Sent: 18 April 2008 08:29
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: copyright licensing and museums
Dear Frankie (et al)
I have been following the discussion with some interest and being into
copyright and all that, felt compelled to respond hook line and sinker when
you first raised the topic, but decided to sit back a bit first (unusually
for me) and wait a little for the discussion to unfold.
I think that your distinctions below are really helpful and map out well the
different types of works that we have in our collections and the "freedoms"
that are associated with each. Underpinning this, is that if a collection
doesn't own the rights or have the permission from third party rights
holders, then they will also lack the freedom to control how the work is
accessed and used. An excellent case for trying to get these necessary
permissions sorted when a work is acquired or created. I have an anecdote
about a very nasty little person sitting out there in cyberspace who is
lurking and waiting for cultural heritage organisations to use his stuff
without his permission, and when they do, going in for the sting. Its not
pleasant, rights holders can do it, and rather skews our risk evaluation
pragmatism when dealing with certain types of works.
Picking up on your "grey" - works of "no known copyright restrictions",
would, in my mind, encapsulates the works which we don't know who owns the
rights or the rights holders cannot be traced. Some of the more geeky
"copyright" lists that I belong to spend many, many hours discussing the
issues surrounding these so called "orphan" works, simply because there is
the potential to have just so many of them in any one collection and there
is currently no legal certainty for collections who wish to use them. This
is a good example of where the necessary collision of worlds needs to happen
- between my geeky copyright friends and the experts on this list. They are
all talking at the moment about the preventative measures needing to be
implementing at an international, organisational and collections level to
stop these works being created in the first place. But referring to the need
to capture "information" and use "databases". This seems to me to be very
much talking as we would 10-20 years ago. We need these discussions held by
m'learned friends to be thinking and actively talking about integrated
systems, dynamic licences, embedded metadata, standards, collections
management systems, digital rights management etc etc if we want to really
try and reduce the number of orphan works. Anyone up for a joint session?
Best wishes
Naomi
IP Consultant
www.naomikorn.com
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of
frankie roberto
Sent: 17 April 2008 18:09
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: copyright licensing and museums
A few quick distinctions to make.
There are at least 3 types of images museums have:
1) scans of artworks/photographs, where the original's copyright has
expired (ie is Public Domain)
2) images where the museum owns the copyright (either through taking
the photo, or through assignment of all rights)
3) images, or scans of images, where a third-party
(artist/photographer) owns the copyright.
(there's also the grey area of 'no known copyright restrictions', but
lets ignore that for now.
There are also a few different freedoms that a museum can grant:
1) freedom to view online, on our websites, plus by extension to
download for personal use.
2) freedom to republish or redistribute (eg put on your blog/website,
or print in a book).
3) freedom to make derivative works (to parody, to draw moustaches, or
to make photoshop 2 images together)
4) freedom to make money from doing 2) or 3).
From my perspective (and of Michael Gueist's), you should certainly be
able to have all 4 freedoms with public domain works (type 1). In
fact, it's impossible not to, other than by misleading people or by
making the images physically inaccessible. These are the kinds of
images that Flickr Commons is all about.
With type 2 works, where we own the copyright, there's no legal
obligation to grant any of the freedoms, but there's a moral argument
that we should be, for the public good, and also a possible
practical/business one - granting the freedoms may generate more
interest, and revenue (in print sales, exhibition tickets, etc) down
the line.
For type 3 works, things are a little more complicated, but we can
still try and make the case to the rights holders that they'd benefit
from making their works freer, in at least some of the above ways.
Cheers,
Frankie
(a slightly younger hippy and open source geek)
On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 5:30 PM, electronic museum
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> All
>
> I think this is a really interesting thread.
>
> Understanding what value can be had from exposure is obviously key.
There's
> lots of evidence out there that getting more eyeballs to your
> stuff (and accepting that some "stealing" will take place) is a much
better
> business model than hiding your assets away and people simply not getting
to
> it at all.
>
> The evidence often clusters around PDFs downloads: see
> http://torrentfreak.com/alchemist-author-pirates-own-books-080124/ where
> Paulo Coelho, author of "The Alchemist" says this:
>
> "In 2001, I sold 10,000 hard copies. And everyone was puzzled. We came
from
> zero, from 1000, to 10,000. And then the next year we were over 100,000.
[.]
> I thought that this is fantastic. You give to the reader the possibility
of
> reading your books and choosing whether to buy it or not. [.]
> So, I went to BitTorrent and I got all my pirate editions. And I created
a
> site called The Pirate Coelho."
>
> With the demise of music DRM apparently on the horizon, it's a hot topic
> with the major music labels, too. Ian Rogers from Yahoo! wrote a
fantastic
> post with slides entitled "Losers wish for scarcity. Winners leverage
> scale". I've written about this on my blog:
> http://electronicmuseum.org.uk/2008/01/14/scarcity-vs-scale/ ...
>
> What would be fantastic (if unlikely) would be if a museum or gallery
agreed
> to take part in a quantitative study: take one selection of images and
hide
> them away behind watermarking, DRM and thumbnails; take another and make
> these widely and hugely available via Facebook, MySpace, Flickr,
blogging,
> etc. Offer both sets for purchase in hi-res, then sit back and measure
over
> a period of time. Common sense says that people will steal all the small
> ones and not bother buying: increasing bodies of evidence show the
opposite
> is actually true.
>
> I'd personally argue that once stuff is on the web, it's being "stolen"
> anyway, so we can fight this or go with it and do what we can to
encourage
> sales off the back of the "scale". But I don't run a picture library so
I'm
> more than ready to put my neck on the line
>
> So. Any museums going to step up to the "make it free" challenge? :-)
>
> ta
>
> Mike
>
> ________________________________________________
>
> electronic museum
>
> ..thoughts on museums, the social web, innovation
>
> w: http://www.electronicmuseum.org.uk
> f: http://electronicmuseum.wordpress.com/feed
> e: [log in to unmask]
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 4:05 PM, Ridge, Mia
<[log in to unmask]>
> wrote:
>
>
>
> > Frankie Roberto wrote:
> >
> > > At the conference there did seem to be a vague consensus that we
> > > should be moving towards giving access to these images (the public
> > > domain ones at the very least) away though - especially with the
> > > general buzz around Flickr Commons.
> > >
> > > Does anyone have any thoughts about this? And what are the
> > > barriers we need to overcome?
> >
> > I think we gain more than we lose when we provide access to our images,
> > but then I'm an old hippie and open source geek.
> >
> > I think we need to show that it's going to benefit our audiences and
our
> > institutions; and particularly that it's not going to lose money for
our
> > institutions.
> >
> > I'd love to see the figures for total expenditure on commercial image
> > licensing and print services versus total income - do these services
> > currently make a profit, and would that profit be enhanced by increased
> > exposure and 'discoverability' or would that profit be dented if people
> > no longer feel the need to pay for images? Do our museums even know if
> > their image services are truly profitable, and if so does anyone want
to
> > volunteer their data?
> >
> > Someone's just started a discussion on the MCN list
(http://www.mcn.edu)
> > with the subject 'Monetizing museum web sites' and that thread might
> > also throw up some useful suggestions.
> >
> > cheers, Mia
> >
> >
> > Mia Ridge
> > Database Developer, Museum Systems Team
> > Museum of London Group
> > 46 Eagle Wharf Road
> > London. N1 7ED
> > Tel: 020 7410 2205 / 020 7814 5723
> > Fax: 020 7600 1058
> > Email: [log in to unmask]
> > www.museumoflondon.org.uk
> > Museum of London is changing; our lower galleries will be closed while
> > they undergo a major new development. Visit www.museumoflondon.org.uk
to
> > find out more.
> > London's Burning - explore how the Great Fire of London shaped the city
we
> > see today www.museumoflondon.org.uk/londonsburning
> > Before printing, please think about the environment
> >
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the
> > website at http://www.museumscomputergroup.org.uk
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> >
>
>
>
> --
>
>
>
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