The Guide’s primary author is Canadian . In the Guide’s acknowledgments, Pantalony recognized the instrumental help of fellow Canadian art IP expert . Art and law commenters the new guide, but that it fails to address what museums can do when faced with copyright law shortcomings born from the in counterfeit art facilitated by new technologies. The Guide openly states that it “does not argue for strong or weak IP protection” but rather focuses on how museums can manage IP while balancing their societal mandates to be centres of learning and intellectual curiosity.

Analysis: Guide Review

This 90-page document is a must read for anyone in the museum, art or cultural industries. It’s an accessible, straightforward read. Given the variability in copyright and intellectual property between countries, it acts to whet the appetite of anyone looking for a general guide to the issues of art and culture preservation within a legal context.

Moreover, the document flows brilliantly. The author takes the reader through introductory definition chapters; for example, how copyright and trade-marks are defined in a museum context. The author then goes into heavier issues such as best practices for a museum IP audit. It also covers digital rights management solutions and notes on social media and museums. It includes case studies of successful museum IP management models around the world. Finally, it lists out important commercial considerations such as distribution, licensing and co-branding with non-museum entities.

In regards to the Guide’s attempt to take a neutral position vis-à-vis the laws themselves, there is certainly no such thing as neutrality, especially when it comes to museum art and ownership. One need look no further than the or the to know that even where the law is clear, politics pervades. Additionally, WIPO in its entirety has for its western cultural and legal bias.

Another controversial issues is that assertive museum IP policies – aptly described in Canadian Heritage Information Network’s (CHIN’s) as the demise of the “” – can have a on museums as educative experiences for consumers. Growing focus on IP laws by museums increases the tension between museums and the consumers of the content; copyright versus education is one of the most common debates in intellectual property law. One of the most obvious examples of this, one that touches all of us, is the way museums choose to restrict visitor photography. Some museums believe that photos violate intellectual property, while some and  are advocating for more open photo policies.

Even with these tectonic issues underlying museum IP and WIPO, the Guide does do a fairly good job of being fair. It attempts to stand back from the fray and be as politically agnostic in its recommendations as possible. And it succeeds.

On a final personal note, it’s nice to see the Canadian authors and those that influenced the document comfortably promote our domestic museum management practices on the world stage. CHIN's Community Memories initiative for smaller Canadian museums and community centre archives is profiled. The Guide also outlines CHIN’s North America-wide studies of museum IP and management practices. And finally, the Guide profiles the Department of Heritage’s launch of the , an online museum of internet-based exhibitions.

So even amidst mild criticisms of the Guide’s neutrality in regards to the current IP laws, it’s hard not to be proud of this document, its authors, and the progressive work that Canada has done to support museums and their IP management.

Denise Brunsdon is an IPilogue Editor, JD/MBA Candidate at Western University, and researcher for GRAND (Graphics, Research and New Media) Centre.

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On October 27, 2011 the European Commission adopted a recommendation calling for the nations of the EU to pool their resources and renew their commitment to the digitisation of European cultural texts and artifacts. These cultural materials are stored in Europe’s digital library, .

As , Europeana represents Europe’s homegrown response to competition from Google Books. Started in 2008 with only 2 million items, Europeana’s collection has since grown to over 19 million objects. These objects include digitised books, photographs, paintings, manuscripts, maps, newspapers, archival documents, audio and film. As Google’s resource digitisation project gained traction in the United States in 2008 and 2009, the EU launched Europeana as a publicly funded alternative that allowed them to sidestep the perils they perceived to exist in Google’s project. The European Commission worried about reliance on a corporate actor for the preservation and reproduction of their culture and history.

As outlined in both the and by the European Commission announcing the adoption of Recommendation 2011/711/EU, EU member states have been challenged to grow the collection to 30 million items by 2015. In order to achieve this goal, the Commission suggests that states seek innovative solutions and adopt programs that engage the private sector. As outlined in the , the Commission is hoping “to get more in-copyright and out-of-commerce material online and to adapt national legislation and strategies to ensure the long term preservation of digital materials”.

Over the last few years, the Commission has been pushing Europeana as a one-stop shop for the digital preservation of Europe’s shared history and culture. This recommendation is simply another representation of the Commission’s commitment to coming up with a pan-European solution which allows the citizens of Europe greater access to culturally significant items from the comfort of their own homes. As stated by the Commission on previous occasions and affirmed in the press release accompanying Recommendation 2011/711/EU, the hope is that Europeana’s content will spur development of educational content, documentaries, and tourism related applications. The Commission states that the digitisation project “will give enormous economic opportunities to Europe’s creative industries, which currently account for 3.3% of the EU’s GDP and 3% of jobs in the EU.”

Europeana and the digitisation activities associated with it are one of the “digital service infrastructures” earmarked for funding under the and the project plays an integral role in the European Commission’s . Europeana has also just launched two innovative projects. The first, entitled “,” is a project that allows citizens to submit their own stories and memorabilia from World War I. So far, Europeana has collected and digitised more than 25,000 items as part of this project.

The second project Europeana recently undertook was the “”. As part of this project, 85 developers were given access to Europeana’s content in order to produce innovative prototype applications for mobile or gaming devices. With the adoption of this recommendation, Europe has once again affirmed its position that the digitisation of culturally significant objects and in-copyright and out-of-commerce represents an important undertaking that requires support from all of Europe’s Member States.

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Our very own Osgoode professors and feminist scholars, and presented a thought-provoking keynote entitled, “Copyright and the Moral Arts of Appropriation: Feminist and Postcolonial Perspectives”, at the Conference hosted by the of the University of Toronto on November 11, 2011. Linking the overarching conference themes of how appropriation affects different feminisms to the intellectual property rights of postcolonial societies, the presentation provided an intriguing insight into the conflicted worlds of economic rights, technology, knowledge-sharing and cultural preservation.

Speaking on the ideas developed in their paper “” (co-authored with Joseph Turcotte), both Professors Coombe and Craig explored the concept of digital appropriation with respect to developing societies, especially highlighting the impacts of the economics-based property rights management model of the contemporary global intellectual property regime on local communities. The concept of the ‘cultural commons’ here, they argued, was being eroded by the narrow application of intellectual property rights, which confined ownership to one or a few, effectively reducing the scope of societal development by the exclusion of crucial perspectives, especially those of women.

While Craig proposed that the WWW and emerging technologies could be used to enable the public to contribute to the creation of more egalitarian intellectual property rights, Coombe suggested that the very idea of ‘public’ needed an overhaul to include diverse voices, as the term was historically entrenched in gender and social inequalities. Both authors concluded that that “a more inclusive notion of stewardship” is necessary, and that intellectual property rights will only work favorably in postcolonial societies if they work symbiotically, not parasitically, with the communities they wish to benefit from.

Professor Coombe’s approach further involved a critique of North American public domain policies as “too individualistic with their emphasis on public freedoms,” and cited the incompatibility of intellectual property rights derived from these ideas with postcolonial societies. Intellectual property, she said, was more of an enclosure to these societies, and because of this, the notion of the ‘public domain’ itself became “a modern bourgeois term,” that restricted cultural development instead of freeing cultures. According to Coombe, current intellectual property concepts only supported the continued dispossession of local communities, effectively becoming a tool for recolonization. Citing the role of women in farming communities in the developing world, Coombe emphasized the importance of vernacular property rights, including knowledge of land use and agriculture that was passed down orally, “through networks of women’s trust.”

She also argued that with moves such as the patenting of seeds, or preventing cross-breeding of seeds, intellectual property rights were doing more than just preventing innovation in agricultural development— they were denying communities the means to propagate their own intangible wealth of social history, effectively debilitating the already-damaged fabric of postcolonial societies. The answer, according to Coombe, is to broaden the existing perception of private goods and the public domain, and to ensure that intellectual property rights are not just involved in protecting tangible expression, but that a novel “postcolonial ethic of stewardship” can give the intangible contribution of distinctive groups their due.

Professor Craig also drew on a relational theory of copyright law and suggested that, in order to be legitimate, a system of copyright must provide access to various cultural landscapes and must be modified to create spaces where the process of authorship enables “ongoing social dialogue as part of cultural conversation, which then helps shape communities.” The current practice of using copyright law to put forward proprietary claims is a form of Lockean possessive individualism, argued Craig, and only propagates the marginalization of the same groups that have suffered due to exclusion historically. This effectively creates the same problems in intellectual property rights as faced by real property management regimes, because copyright law "wants to believe that expression is created in a vacuum," rather than being a complex interplay of various influences. The solution, according to Craig, lies in open-access initiatives like the (A2K) movement, which is built on collaborative knowledge sharing across cultures. Craig also pointed out that feminism and open-access complemented each other perfectly, since both were concerned with “prioritizing the marginalized and countering private appropriation,” and were “optimistic about technology’s capacity to destabilize the existing power structure.”

Tied into one of the conference’s main concerns of how appropriation could be used in a positive context, the keynote focused on advocating for a more nuanced approach that preserved the uniqueness of postcolonial societies and the “need to protect the ‘we’ with more humility.” It provided a worthy segue into the conference’s second and final day, where many of the questions raised by Professors Coombe and Craig were discussed and debated, and created the background for further dialogue on feminism and the politics of appropriation.

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