Alex Gorshkova

MUSEUM COPYRIGHT POLICY IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

Nowadays social networks, the ability to share information and the ease of Internet access are extremely important to people. Unfortunately, copyrights have a big influence on these concepts, as well as on museum's life in general. This research is aimed at offering recommendations on how to achieve balance between interests of cultural institutions, public and right holders for the museums and artists to conserve their unique copyrights for publishing the images of the objects without losing the interest of visitors. It also touches upon the topic of how to deal with the tension between a monopoly for intellectual rights owned by artists, their heirs and rights managing organizations. This paper provides a review of literature, mainly, legislation documents and analyzes points of view of all the parties involved, such as right-holders (heirs, artists and rights managing companies), museums and similar cultural institutions, and, finally visitors by the means of off-line and on-line research, interviews with professionals and visitors survey. A big part of this research is based upon case studies of Fundacio Palau, Barcelona, Spain.

Being unable to take photos could disappoint visitors and harm museums image. Limitations put by copyrights are often limiting possibilities for development and promotion of museums, especially the small ones. This work provides recommendations on solving these problems as well as a number of other issues that were defined in a process of the research are provided as the result of this piece of work.

Keywords: museums; EU legislation; intellectual property; copyrights.