On Sat, 1 Sep 2001, David E. Haberstich wrote:

+++++ [CLIP] +++++

> It's high time museums got out of the very unwise and absurd habit of having
> donors routinely sign a deed of gift which asserts that the donor owns all
> rights, including copyright and trademark, and is giving everything to the
> museum.  Except in those cases in which the creator of the object is the
> donor, the donor rarely owns anything other than the physical object itself
> and should not be asked to sign a document containing a falsehood.

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

David is entirely correct in all this.  A couple of years ago I saw a
presentation by a lawyer who specialised in intellectual property law who
in the course of just a few minutes demonstrated how there could well be
anything up to a dozen different copyrights or other intellectual property
rights involved in a single illustration in a printed museum catalogue.

In the case of a work of art (other than a commissioned portrait) the
buyer does not acquire any right to copy or reproduce the painting
etc. and any reproduction fees applicable are payable to the artist for
his/her lifetime and then for 70 years more following the artist's
death, unless the copyright is bought as a separate legal transaction and
for an additional price.

Also, under treaty arrangements now almost a century old the world is
split up into different zones for copyright purposes, and the copyright
(or a one-off reproduction right) for Britain can be sold off separately
from that for the USA and Canada.

Two new treaties were drawn up by the United Nations' World Intellectual
Property Organisation (WIPO) in the mid-'90s to try to deal with some of
the emerging new areas of intellectual property rights and problems, and
legislation (or regional in the case of the European Union) to
implement WIPO is going through national parliamentary or equivalent
procedures in many countries at the present time. (For example, WIPO's
disputes procedures are now being used to deal with "cyber-squatting" -
registering a company or other trademark as a web address.)  The texts of
the new WIPO Conventions, plus much other information is on their web site
http://www.wipo.org/


Patrick Boylan

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