Presentation part of The New Copyright Directive: opportunities for cultural heritage institutions at the CIPPM Centre for Intellectual Property, Policy and Management (20 September 2019)

1. Ruth Towse – Bournemouth University
Trilce Navarrete – Erasmus University
Licensing out-of-commerce works:
a perspective from cultural
economics
The New Copyright Directive:
opportunities for cultural heritage
institutions workshop 20 Sept 2019

2. Economics of CMOs
• Reduce transactions costs but reduce incentive to create
through blanket licensing.
• Transaction costs are greater the longer the copyright
term:
– Search costs
– Costs of making arrangements
• In case of the Directive, the relevant incentive is not
‘creating’ the work but ‘preserving’ and ‘disseminating’
them.
• In general the costs are being transferred from the user to
the rights owner by this rule. In fact, copyright is seen as
nuisance for the user – instead of a benefit to society via
creativity.

3. Economics of CMOs
• The main difficulty of the proposal is the idea of out of
commerce. This would mean another layer of search
costs.
• Work I did in music publishing was rife with
ambiguities on ownership and titles, and what was in
or out of commerce.
• The long term solution of this problems is the digital
equivalent of registration i.e. using International
Standard numbers. But this is another mind field… as
the music industry has discovered to its cost.
• Another issue is why would the CMOs want to
administer ER?

4. …and for museums
• From a cultural economics perspective, there
are four key questions to ask:
• First: What is ‘out of commerce’ in a museum
if objects can be sold anytime?
– Museums may not own the objects / hold
copyright (long-term loans)
– Museums may want to consider a sale of a piece
(deaccessioning is never an easy topic)
– Or is it about image licensing? Potentially never
out of commerce ! (e.g. Getty Images)

5. …and for museums
• Second, Why do museums digitise?
– Digitisation may respond to one or more goals,
each leading to its own rabbit hole...
– Museums may not want to digitise, due to lack of
legal / technical know-how, loss of potential
income, or fear of loosing control (loss of moral
right aspects).
– Museums approach this differently:

6. …and for museums
• Third, Who finances and who benefits from
the digitisation and online access?
– The digital museum is a public good and therefore
public financing can be allocated
– Can a digital museum expect a different (broader)
audience than the regular physical museum?
– What is the role of heritage collections in feeding
the development of new products in the
information economy? (private benefit)

7. …and for museums
• Fourth, Is the Directive an incentive for
museums to mass digitise and make
collections accessible online?
– Endorsed by large museums / partnerships
– Supported by technological advancement
(e.g. LinkedArt)

8. …and for museums
• Museums are multipurpose organisations:
– Preservation, research, display (devils triangle)
• 82% EU heritage institutions are engaged with
digitisation, 42% have a digital strategy,
progress in 2017 (ENUMERATE):
– Digital catalogue 58%
– Digital image 10%
– Online accessible 3% of all heritage collections

9. …and for museums
Status of copyright condition for full content (N506) ENUMERATE 2017

10. …and for museums
• From previous research on the availability of
images / articles in Wikipedia, there is a gap in
online accessibility
• There is clearly a need / desire to digitise and
make collections fully accessible.
0
200
400
600
800
1000
1200
-900
1050
1261
1324
1360
1400
1427
1450
1473
1495
1517
1539
1561
1583
1605
1627
1649
1671
1693
1715
1737
1759
1781
1803
1825
1847
1869
1891
1913
1935
1957
1979
2001
Paintings Images

11. Concluding thoughts
• Copyright as applied to creators to create,
does not fit comfortably in the role of
museums – mostly with historic collections.
Than you