Making Copyright Determinations for Open Access in GLAMs
Welcome to the first post in a short series where Anne Young will present the underlying rights and reproductions practices that help inform Open Access in GLAM institutions (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums). These posts were compiled out of the set of tweets that Anne did during her curation of the @openglam Twitter account. Remember you can do it too, just sign up here!
Anne Young is the Director of Legal Affairs and Intellectual Property at Newfields and editor of “Rights and Reproductions: The Handbook for Cultural Institutions, Second Edition”, for which she received the Visual Resources Association’s Nancy DeLaurier Award in 2017.
My perspective on Open Access is within the framework of US copyright law, but many of its mechanics can be applied to Open Access practices and Open GLAM institutions worldwide, applying their applicable law(s). Before you can implement Open Access in a GLAM institution, you need to know some of the basics of rights and reproductions.
Why are Rights and Reproductions important for Open Access?
What are “rights and reproductions” and why should GLAM institutions focus on them as they take their first steps towards Open Access?
Rights and Reproductions (R&R for short) stem from a traditional stance of copyright practices in GLAMs. This can be simply defined as the “Right of Reproduction” or “the right of the copyright owner to create any reproductions or copies of the work.”¹
R&R practices in GLAMs have traditionally fallen to a variety of job descriptions, including but not limited to registrars, librarians, archivists, and intellectual property lawyers. Today more and more GLAMs recognize the need for dedicated R&R staff, which I will broadly refer to in these posts as R&R Specialists.
A R&R Specialist “refers to a contractor or employee of a cultural institution (GLAM) who is responsible for managing intellectual property rights, including but not limited to registrars, rights and reproductions managers, archivists, librarians, and lawyers.”²
R&R practices have been focused traditionally on copyright clearances, processing external requests for permissions to use GLAM content, and general intellectual property matters. But R&R practices in GLAMs have drastically changed in the last decade. Today, R&R Specialists must also balance ethical considerations, such as traditional knowledge, trademarks, or privacy concerns.
Just a short decade ago much R&R work meant processing external requests with existing slides and transparencies or, if digital files existed, sending those files via post on discs or hard drives. How many GLAMs today still use a darkroom? Only a few, I bet!
As recently as the early 2000s, many GLAMs likely still functioned with traditional photographic materials — GLAM collections online was a dream realized by few. The explosion of content generation and greater ease of distribution in the digital realm pose new challenges to R&R. Many GLAMs are scrambling to keep up with R&R practices and Open GLAM goals. It’s a seismic shift.
In our second post, we explore what a R&R Specialist does in their regular job and learn what they have to consider when assessing the collection(s) of their institution. Click below to read on:
Disclaimer: The content of this post does not constitute legal advice nor does it refer to any particular or specific situation. If you have any doubts about your specific situation, you should consult with a lawyer.
Footnotes
[1] Megan P. Bryant, Cherie C. Chen, Kenneth D. Crews, John ffrench, Walter G. Lehmann, Naomi Leibowitz, Melissa Levine, Sofía Galarza Liu, Michelle Gallagher Roberts, Nancy Sims, Deborah Wythe and Anne M. Young, Rights and Reproductions: The Handbook for Cultural Institutions, Second Edition. Edited by Anne M. Young. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2019, p. 350.
[2] Idem, p. 350.
