Dear Colleagues,

Increasingly, artists are being commissioned to deliver cultural heritage activity. This is for a wide range of reasons including audience development, collections interpretation, intangible heritage enactment, and to address gaps in material or historic records. We would like to explore open licensing with creatives and commissioning organisations, to surface concerns and impacts, as well as the opportunities and benefits of openly licensing digital outputs including performances, art works, and digital representations of artistic activity.

Following consultation and discussion with artists, commissioning organisations and the global CC Copyright Platform, the UK’s National Lottery Heritage Fund will facilitate the production of a short co-created paper outlining current concerns, risk and opportunities in relation to openly licensing commissioned artistic works. We hope the project will make a positive contribution to public considerations of ethics in relation to open licensing, supporting discussion and policy development, and providing artists and organisations with information to support informed decision making and commissioning.

We are looking for colleagues who would like to join our expert advisory group. We’ll host our first online discussion in June and share our paper at end November 2023.

If you’d like to be part of this initiative, or know someone who would, sign up is available at 2023 Working Group Volunteers - Google Docs

Many thanks,

Josie Fraser

Josie Fraser (she/her)

Head of Digital Policy

National Lottery Heritage Fund

4th Floor, Cannon Bridge House

25 Dowgate Hill, London, EC4R 2YA

Phone: 020 8132 6649

Website: https://www.heritagefund.org.uk

#NationalLotteryHeritageFund