Doing the Rights Thing: Copyright and Open Collections at M+
M+ is a new museum of 20th and 21st century visual culture, currently under construction in Hong Kong. Here, as with any museum, taking care of copyright is an important part of enabling almost every area of a our operations. This includes securing rights and permissions to reproduce images of thousands of objects from our collections of modern and contemporary visual art, moving image, and design and architecture.
In 2017, M+ decided to move towards open access for the M+ Collections — an endeavour in which the question of copyright is central. We’ve had to answer the question: How do you open up a museum’s contemporary collections, and properly address the complex rights perspective? Below are a few thoughts.
Open Access at M+: Two Key Projects
To date, M+ has collected over 6,000 objects and 15,000 archive items. The M+ museum building is due to open next year, but in the meantime, we are growing the museum’s digital presence in 2019 to share:
- an updated open data set (textual metadata from our collections) under a CC0 licence, and,
- a new M+ Collections Beta website that enables users to search the museum’s collections.
From a rights perspective there are big differences between these two projects:
- The open data set contains no images. M+ owns all rights to the textual metadata we produce. We can therefore release the metadata widely and have decided to give it away as an open data set under a CC0 licence.
- The M+ Collections Beta website, on the other hand, displays images of collection objects. We have enabled the website to be illustrated by securing permission from the artists and creators who own the copyrights for the images. However, since M+ does not own these copyrights, we cannot include images in the open data set release.
Why Use a CC0 Licence?
M+ is creating knowledge as we research and catalogue our collections. The institution’s mission is to spread this knowledge far and wide. For this reason, we decided to share our open data releases under a Creative Commons CC0 licence, so that anyone who is interested in our area of expertise can access and use it, in whatever way they choose, including as a stimulus in a wider creative economy.
What About Open Access to Images?
When we look at sharing, we look carefully at what we have a right to share, as well as the value of sharing it. ‘Sharing’ digital content is now almost a universal practice — just look at social media. But not all sharing is good, or legal. You can’t legally share somebody else’s personal data without permission, for example. The same is true of copyright material.
Artists and creators own the copyrights for the images on our websites, so this material is not ours to give away — we only have permission to use it in specific ways. So, while we have secured permission to publish images on our website, artists and creators have not authorised us to include images as part of our open data release.
Showing ‘Work in Progress’
Anxieties often arise around projects of this kind, and our museum’s digital projects are no exception. Any large database is always a ‘work in progress’ in terms of accuracy, consistency, and scope, and it takes courage to do this work in public. The decision to do so is informed by careful thinking about the mission of the organisation. It is important for M+’s audiences to see and access the collections we are building for them, without delay. Revealing ‘work in progress’ is an honest acknowledgement that the M+ Collections will continue to grow, and that our database will never be complete, though our knowledge will continue to improve. This decision is also consistent with practice in our peer institutions internationally.
Taking Care of Copyright — It’s Personal
The best creative work is often very personal. It is reasonable that creators should care about the context in which their work is reproduced, and it is also reasonable that they should share in the benefits when their work is used commercially.
So when it comes to copyright, perhaps it is useful to think of art and other creative works as ‘personal data’, not to be shared without permission. All sharing is not equal — even in today’s digital age, in which sharing images has become almost unquestioned.
In a Nutshell
For M+, ‘Doing the Rights Thing’ in relation to open data is about delivering social value by making information available legally and respectfully, as widely as possible. We publish images online with artists’ and creators’ generous permission. We offer our data about artists’ and creators’ work with the museum’s most open permission.
Enjoy!
