Yule Heibel's Library tagged copyright →  View Popular

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.

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.

Now you have billionaire media empires behaving as though parents should get a licence for a Prince song before they upload a YouTube video of their adorable toddler dancing to it.

They are also acting as though fan fiction writers should be applying for a licence too - along with karaoke singers, would-be painters and, yes, the OAP picnickers who've uploaded the shakycam video of last weekend's knees-up in the church basement.

This is a genuinely radical idea: individuals should hire lawyers to negotiate their personal use of cultural material, or at least refrain from sharing their cultural activities with others (except it's not's really culture if you're not sharing it, is it?).

It's also a dumb idea. People aren't going to hire lawyers to bless the singalong or Timmy's comic book. They're also not going to stop doing culture.