In a forthcoming report, A Blueprint for the Future: Supporting arts and cultural organisations in Northern Ireland to become more financially resilient, Margaret Bolton and I map out a programme of support for small and medium-sized arts organisations in Northern Ireland, that builds on capitalisation work by Creative Trust Working Capital for the Arts39 (Toronto, Canada). If participating organisations manage, through their own efforts, to reduce their deficits or increase their surpluses, the programme will match-fund by investing in their financial capital. Financially fragile organisations find it challenging to survive, never mind thrive and innovate. By strengthening their capital base, the programme will help to give our arts sector the breathing space to fly.
‘CultureBanked®’ - Our Digital Commons? Liam Murphy
In a cultural sector which diverges massively around ownership - or simply ignores it - it is interesting that ‘the commons’ is increasingly in the vanguard of conversation. Before you can share though you have to understand what’s yours and what’s not. My focus in this article is on ‘digital cultural commons’. For simplicity, I’m referring here only to artistic production made, stored, distributed or represented digitally. The objective of (digital) commoning is that content should be available to all equally - exploitable, but non-exclusive. Starting from a position of giving it all away is not going to lead to a common stock of anything. And neither is centralising ownership. Thinking about cultural products as common resources to build from - extensions of the knowledge-based commons - sends some hard-working artists into a miasmic fit of income loss induced panic. So first a few observations about how much we do and don’t own in terms of intellectual property (IP) and what the opportunities are for our digital commons in particular. The IP system often claims to respect the ‘rights of authors’ but in fact, little protection or monetisation is possible until the rights we have as authors have been offered up to, usually, a publisher. Twitter, Facebook, Unsplash, etc., like most content management sites, have absolute waivers when it comes to remuneration or control of original work. Basically, they assume all rights and insist that authors relinquish them. Even where Creative Commons licenses are used for sharing (e.g., Flickr), commercial sales are not permitted - though links to websites are. Copyright is arguably a charter for the protection of publishers and owners of rights - rather than for the protection of content creators. But, as creators, we do have power - if we choose to exercise it. The perception of copyright as a corporate or publishers’ tool for profit also creates a resistance among artists who do not view their original works as appropriate for reproduction, sharing or ‘trade’ worthiness. This reasonable antipathy also bolsters the ‘anti-copyright’ movement, which has found expression in alternative licenses. Not being ‘defined’ by market value alone is important for the arts. At the same
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