New DACS licence for museums and heritage organisations in the pipeline

Posted by Dave Kilbey on Thursday 09 July 2009 at 12:22pm
Tags: copyright | digitisation |

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Basis for the licence

As an institution or individual, digitising works for educational use can be a prohibitively expensive and time consuming process in terms of clearing rights. And what of works where the rights holder can't be traced, so called orphan works?

There is the feeling generally that due diligence may not provide an adequate defence given the potential financial and reputational risk involved with using works with unidentified copyright status.

A solution?

For the Museums and Heritage sector a solution may be on the horizon. Within the new licence proposed by DACS (Design and Artists Copyright Society), institutions within remit would be able to:

• Digitise analogue resources and provide access to digital copies in the manner specified below
• Digitise large numbers of items

Key benefits of using the licence will be the ability to:

• Greatly reduce the administrative burden involved with tracing rights holders when digitising works
• Obtain legal certainty (indemnity) over copied works, even for orphan works and works from countries without a reciprocal copyright agreement.

Included in the scope of the licence are objects such as: paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photos, design objects and models. It is envisaged that the digital copies made can be disseminated via; vodcasts, educational packs, interactive displays, traditional lecture materials, websites and so on. Importantly, the licence will not indemnify for the use of digitised copies in publications (it has yet to be established whether non-commercial publications are included in this), e-books and any advertising/marketing uses.

Additional features of the proposed licence include:

• The customer will pay for the digitisation of an object not for the number of times the object is copied.
• Payment will be made in advance to cover the number of digital objects required.

As with other collective licences there will be the necessity to report on the type and number of works copied/made available. This is to enable DACS to provide appropriate payments to the artists involved. There will also be the possibility of institutional auditing.

Cost of the licence

The precise cost of the licence is yet to be established. However, the per-item price of digitising was indicated to be in the region of £3-4.

Finishing touches

The main body of work regarding the licence has been done. However, there are still many details left to be decided upon and input from museums was encouraged, particularly regarding how information on artists can be recorded and passed on to DACS (and vice versa). Updates will be posted as and when further information becomes available.

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