On Sun, 5 Mar 2000, Anna Elffers wrote:

> I am a graduate student of Arts Administration and I am curious about the
> following. I often see particular programs and exhibits that are used by
> different museums. I was wondering: can museums just copy eachother's
> ideas/programs? Or are there rules for that? Are some ideas 'patented' by a
> particular museum and do other museums have to pay to use that idea? Or do
> you have to acknowledge the inventor in another way? Is there an unwritten
> rule that you at least have to contact the inventor before using his/hers
> ideas?

=============================

Anna:

You have raised a very interesting question, since as you have observed
there is a great deal of copying of exhibition ideas and - especially in my
experience - "hand's on" science museum/center and children's museum
experiments.  Indeed, travelling very widely around the world while
developing new science museums I reached the point where I was genuinely
surprised to see something genuinely new to me, rather than a 34th version
of one of the exhibits detailed with full construction details etc. in one
or other of the successive "Exhibit Cook Books" published by the San
Francisco Exploratorium, and sold in quite large numbers over the past
15/20 years or so.

Under the various international laws & conventions, and most if not all
national law, there is no copyright as such in ideas or concepts.

However, copyright certainly exists in a written or visual text which
involves some artistic or creative work.  In general copyright doesn't
have to be registered in any way: it exists and can be defended if copied.
The extent to which  something is a copy for copyright purposes is a
matter for the courts to judge, but certainly copying without permission
the actual text of e.g. exhibit labels from one exhibition on e.g. Ancient
Egypt in another, or in a publication, would be a breach of copyright,
even if the words were used in a totally different design and layout, and
whether or not the source was acknowledged.

I have never heard of anyone seeking a patent or design registration in an
exhibition.  To do so would require proof that this is either a genuine
invention that has not previously been produced or even publicly proposed
before the paten application is submitted to the regulatory authority for
the country in question (patent) or a creative design as a whole
(registered design).  Patenting in particular involves very specific (and
usually very costly) processes country by country (or group of countries by
group of countries where some sort of reciprocal recognition and
enforcement exists).

It would in principle be very good to have some sort of code under which
the origin of the exhibit design ideas were acknowledged, but I'm not sure
that the true provenance or pre-history of many of even the most common
science museum hand's on exhibits, to return to that example, is well
enough documented.  Even the genuinely original (in museum terms) first
wave of Exploratorium exhibits have in most cases ancestries in scientific
research and advanced science teaching (e.g. the early work there on brain
function including perception, developed in partnership with the leading
British scientist Richard Gregory (who went on to develop his own science
centre in his home city of Bristol).

Other common examples can be traced back much further still, certainly to
the popular science demonstration public lectures of the 18th and 19th
centuries, or to the "heuristic" (learning by discovery) science teaching
movement of the 1920s to 1960s, or even much earlier, as in the very
effective re-interpretation of Classical Greek, Arabic and Mogul science
in some of the excellent and innovative hand's on exhibits developed by
the National Council of Science Museums of India over the past 25 years
or more.

Who or what should be acknowledged  in such cases?

Certainly, if the exhibit is a direct copy (or perhaps even actually
manufactured by another institution - as with the Toronto Science Centre's
contracted work to reproduce some of its key exhibits in the first phase
of the Chinese National Science Museum in Beijing) in my experience there
usually is an acknowledgement.

Patrick J. Boylan
(Professor of Heritage Policy and Management)
City University, London,

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