‘Display at Your Own Risk: Andrea Wallace at Kent’

by Natasha Usherwood LLM Student

A POST AUTHORED BY NATASHA USHERWOOD, LLM STUDENT

During our ‘Intellectual Property and Industrial Practices’ seminar on 27th February 2017 we were joined by Andrea Wallace, our guest lecturer from the University of Glasgow. Through her research, Andrea has looked widely into the role of cultural heritage institutions within the public sector and the issues arising from associated IP rights. Specifically, Andrea’s research considers how the increasing need for such institutions to commercialise and keep pace with technology notably through digitisation has impacted on the public domain. Indeed, these issues in turn raises important questions on the cultural, ethical and legal issues at hand.

What is interesting is that at present, when a museum makes a digital surrogate work available to an organisation such as Flickr Commons or the Google Art Project the same permissions and uses are not necessarily then made available on the museums own website. Furthermore, Andrea identified problems in cultural institutions where the information that has been attached to the digital surrogate actually contradicts that information displayed within its online policy.

During our seminar I found Andrea’s ideas on museums creating ‘surrogate’ works, essentially as new works to which rights are attached most persuasive. Moreover, these works would then be better protected and their rights more efficiently recognisable online through their metadata which may then encourage museums to create more surrogate works.

The long-term benefits of such a system would arguably benefit the museum, public and the creator or the work alike. Metadata stores detailed information on the process and edits of a surrogate work created. Where a user downloads and reuses a surrogate work, perhaps in an open source exhibition it in theory becomes detached from the relevant use policy and context of the museum which would be lost forever if not attached to the digital surrogate and preserved through its metadata. This then allows further reuse of the work as well as information on the location of where the original work is held and by who it was created. Furthermore, any restrictions that may then apply to the reuse of the surrogate work is clear to the user, such information might desist unauthorised reuse of the works.

Andrea’s research project ‘Display at your own Risk’:

(http://displayatyourownrisk.org/wallace-exhibition-methodology/) is well worth a look at. Andrea may well have identified a greater system of copyright protection for surrogate works in cultural institutions. Particularly as digital cultural heritage continues to develop at an increasing rate, so does the technology of creating different forms of digital surrogates and ways of sharing them online. Copyright law in comparison is lagging behind and often leaves a void between the enjoyment of the public and the preservation of cultural heritage.