Digital Culture Heresy (musings after #glamwiki)

"This is why the Europeana Public Domain Charter, which I heard about for the first time at GLAM-WIKI, is so important. It states that copyright protection is temporary, and that the digitisation of out-of-copyright content should not create new rights in it. Works that are in the Public Domain in analogue form should continue to be in the Public Domain once they have been digitised. Yet this does not, as far as I can see, necessarily have to imply that users are granted a free-for-all licence to take what they please from cultural heritage organisations without acknowledgement. There might even still be a requirement to pay some kind of financial recognition towards the costs involved in digitising fragile materials and in making them available online. But the emphasis shifts away from paying for a product (copies of the actual cultural heritage content – documents and objects) to acknowledging the costs of the process of providing online access to digital culture...."