"Museums should end fees for public domain" by Michael Geist (Toronto Star) - The Diigo Meta page

• 17 Apr 08
  

  Yule Heibel

  Michael Geist extends the discussion of publicly-owned Canadian museums and their often outrageous admissions fees (24/7) into the area of those same museums and/or archives charging outrageous fees for materials already in the public domain or belonging to the public.

  thestar copyright copyfight museums archives access fees public_domain

  • Last week the City of Montreal hosted the annual Museums and the Web conference, which brings together hundreds of museum leaders from around the world. For the past 12 years, the conference has served as the focal point for the digitization of museum collections, artifacts and exhibits as museums open themselves up to new audiences and possibilities.

    The dozens of presentations at the conference highlighted the remarkable transformation in how museums display their collections and interact with the public.

  • For example, the McCord Museum of Canadian History in Montreal has poured significant resources into digitization, amassing more than 135,000 digital images that are freely accessible online. Similarly, the Canadian Museum of Civilization (which includes both that museum and the new Canadian War Museum) attracted a record 1.8 million visitors in 2006, but more impressively hit 66 million page views for Web-based content.

    Many museums are using online video, social networks and interactive multimedia to pull content from diverse places to create "virtual museums." So, the museum community has emerged as a leading voice for the development of legal frameworks to facilitate digitization and avoid restrictions that could hamper cultural innovation.

  • 5 more annotations...

  • • Yet some fear the advocacy and actions of museums in embracing the Internet are not consistent, particularly in their policies on works for which copyright has expired.

      Many museums receive regular requests for copies of works in collections to be reproduced in school texts, magazines or other publications. The fees vary widely. Some museums levy handling and/or reproduction fees and permission fees, despite the expiry of copyright.

    • the National Gallery of Canada appears to be taking the opposite approach, treating public-domain works as a profit centre.

    • The Access to Information Act records covered requests to the National Gallery for copies of public-domain artworks between February 2006 and January 2007. The gallery received approximately 250 such requests, and imposed contractual restrictions on use of the images and levied an average fee of $379.

      Internal documents reveal the gallery often added hundreds of dollars to the total cost of fulfilling a request, despite the fact that the images were in the public domain. In fact, the permission costs for such works were actually higher than those for works still subject to copyright. The gallery reasoned that the copyright holder would apply additional charges.

    • Some dismiss these fees as a cost of doing business at a time when museums are struggling to make ends meet. The reality, however, is that the fees impede access to and use of Canadian culture and, ultimately, undermine claims for enhanced taxpayer support.
    • The time has come for Canada's museums to remove these costs and contractual barriers to Canadian heritage.
      

      • 

        Yule Heibel on 2008-04-17

        Hear, hear!

Public Stiky Notes

• 
  Yule Heibel on 2008-04-17
  Hear, hear!

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