Hi Dimi,
This is a fantastic question. I think it's been investigated from different
angles, but there is certainly room to improve and update the research.
https://www.clir.org/pubs/reports/pub157/
"Revenue matters less than many institutions think it does. Cost recovery
and even, in some cases, net income from commercial licensing activities
are important considerations for museums. Although a past study has shown
that virtually no museum rights and reproductions operation is a profit
center (Tanner and Deegan 2002), and although museums generally acknowledge
that their obligation and desire to provide information about the
collection in as open a manner as possible trumps revenue concerns, revenue
remains a topic of interest to many museums today."
http://www.wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/en/copyright/1001/wipo_pub_1001.pdf
"Recent developments in business models concerning the production and
distribution of content on the Internet, coupled with a continued
examination by museums of their missions and mandates, has led to an
awareness that the making available of museum images is merely a means to a
commercial end, and not the end in itself. Indeed, in a recent press
release, the Victoria and Albert Museum announced that it would no longer
charge fees for academic and scholarly reproduction and distribution of its
images, claiming that while it earned approximately $250,000 a year from
scholarly licensing programs, the overhead costs associated with licensing
fees rendered their profits much less.140 What is not reported, but what is
suspected, is that the Victoria and Albert Museum determined that it was
smart business to allow its copyright-protected images to be made available
for free, thereby increasing their circulation and delivering significant
promotional opportunities back to the museum.
This sort of decision-making in academic and educational institutions has
been documented since 2001, when MIT undertook a similar inventory of its
IP, allowing certain types of its academic content to be made available on
the Internet without charge. While contributing to the public good and
furthering the educational mission and mandate of a collecting institution
is primordial, it is argued here that providing unfettered access to museum
images is actually good business."
On Wed, Oct 17, 2018 at 6:17 AM Dimitar Parvanov Dimitrov <
dimitar.parvanov.dimitrov(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all,
I need to brainstorm with this group on museum incomes.
As you might know we are having some issues [1] with copyright and related
rights being claimed on digitisations of public domain works. We are
working on fixing this [2] over the legislative path in the EU. The
recently adopted mandate of the European Parliament [3], as bad as it was,
at least introduced a paragraph (Article 5.1a. & Article 5.1b.) that would
solve many of these issues.
As this is a new article introduced by the European Parliament, the Member
States attachés in the Council are currently discussing it. One of the
worries they seem to be having is not to endager museum incomes. We have
shared the opinion that museum shop sales are mostly dependend on location,
rather than on exclusivity.
It would, of course, be good to have some analysis/research/data on museum
income and exclusivity of works. Therefore I wanted to ask the list:
- Do you know of such research?
- Do you know of someone who would be interested in doing such
research? (We might have a grant available.)
Thanks!
Dimi
[
1]https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Reuse_of_PD-Art_photographs
[
2]https://blog.wikimedia.org/2017/06/30/time-to-protect-pd/
[3]
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?type=TA&language=EN&r…
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