Copyright Chaos Reigns Among The UK’s Top Cultural Institutions

"The perennial attempts to widen the reach of copyright in the pursuit of yet more revenue is something that is to be expected from companies. After all, maximizing profits is basically what companies do. But as previous Walled Culture posts have lamented, there is also a widespread tendency among non-profit cultural institutions – museums, art galleries, libraries etc. – to use copyright to generate revenue from images of their holdings, to the detriment of public access. The problem here is that the majority of their collections are unequivocally in the public domain, and yet these cultural institutions are trying to claim that a digital reproduction of those public domain objects is not in the public domain.

A post in February noted that the recent THJ v Sheridan court ruling in the UK effectively prevented these kind of copyright claims being made over faithful reproductions of public domain materials. The post also quoted from an analysis by Douglas McCarthy about the likely impact of that ruling. McCarthy has followed that up with more detailed work looking at the current copyright policies and practices of 16 leading UK cultural institutions. His post reporting on the results bears the ominous title “Anarchy in the UK”. Making requests under the UK’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), he asked two questions:

Does your institution claim copyright in digital images of 2D out-of-copyright visual works (such as prints or photographs) in its collections? If so, on what basis in law are such claims made?

Has your institution sought or received any legal advice on copyright in its digital images of out of copyright artworks in the last ten years, and in response to the recent THJ v Sheridan case? If so, will you release that advice? ..."