As is usually the case, it's difficult to add much that's useful to a
Patrick Boylan response!!!

I am entirely in agreement with him, especially as regards science centres,
which so often feature the same bright little playstations (I very much
doubt that users learn much from them) whether you are in London or Bendigo.

"Where's Bendigo?" you ask. Some miles up the Yarra River from Melbourne;
pretty little town with a dreadful little science centre.

Indeed, I have heard that all these science centre modules are manufactured
by a company in Wales, which would go a long way to explain their relative
uniformity.

 I have personally neither seen nor heard of any cases of direct copying of
exhibits or texts. Were such copying to occur, the remedies suggested by
Patrick would/could be applied.

But I would argue for MORE of, if not copying, at least the adaptation and
application of good ideas from elsewhere.

When we visit other museums, we in the heritage field spend a great deal of
time looking critically at each other's institutions, but relatively few
seem to apply the good ideas they have discovered elsewhere to their own
institutions. We are better at sneering than using. This seems particularly
true of those of us in North America.

We mostly seem to be the last of the rugged individualists, quite happy to
keep on producing one mediocre exhibition or program after another, almost
always without ever looking at our visitors, how they feel and what they
want.

By contrast, the Australians are particularly adept at utilizing other
people's good ideas, as well, of course, their own. They roam the world,
looking for the best ideas they can find, then synthesize these into a
uniquely Strine approach, which varies widely across institutions. It isn't
copying; it is the application of "best practices". We in North America
could learn from the Aussies and I suspect this may be true of our
colleagues elsewhere.

I really don't see much copying but, by God, we need more adaptation of
other people's good ideas!!!

Harry

----- Original Message -----
From: Boylan P <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, March 05, 2000 8:08 PM
Subject: Re: patented ideas?


> 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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