Hi all
I looked at this a few years ago for the UK and most of the national museums refused to give the information in an Freedom of Information request or didn't calculate it
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/user/cheryl_hall
One exception is the Natural History Museum who published it in their annual accounts (they refused the FOI but made the info public) which shows a loss of £155,000 over 5 years (this would be larger but they included filming location profits in the calculation).
Thanks
On Wed, 17 Oct 2018, 20:33 Timothy Vollmer, tvol@creativecommons.org wrote:
Here's a few links shared with me from some GLAM folks that might be of interest...
Reaping the Benefits of Digitisation: Pilot study exploring revenue generation from digitised collections through technological innovation https://ewic.bcs.org/content/ConWebDoc/59616
Museum Policies and Art Images: Conflicting Objectives and Copyright Overreaching https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2120210
Copyright, Museums and Licensing of Art Images
http://www.kressfoundation.org/research/copyright_museums_and_licensing_of_a...
cheers, tvol
On Wed, Oct 17, 2018 at 10:10 AM Stephen LaPorte slaporte@wikimedia.org wrote:
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@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&re...
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