- decade later. Rather than damaging their profitability, the National Portrait Gallery reported 36 of the top 50 selling images from 2010-2015 came from these.[1]
- Royal Museums Greenwich received between £88,000 (2014) and £146,000 (2017) in profit.
- Sir John Soane’s Museum made approximately £5,000 each year. Annual costs to run the licensing service are around £4,450 per annum.
- Tate data relates to income from photographs of public domain artworks, rather than profit, and ranges from £191,316 (2014) to £161,535 (2016).
- Victoria & Albert Museum made between £75,000 (2014) and £166,000 (2017) in profit for all image licensing*, while spending between £122,000 (2015) and £201,000 (2018) in salaries and overheads.
- Wallace Collection brought in between £6,000 and £10,000 after accounting for direct costs (mainly staff) but no indirect overheads.[2]
* Income data includes all image licensing, rather than only images of public domain artworks.
Collections data and metadata are also perceived to carry commercial licensing value, particularly with archival materials around family and local histories, data held by regimental museums, and comparable materials value to platforms like Ancestry.com[3] and FindMyPast.[4]
The 2015 Striking the Balance report noted it was “difficult to identify detailed information about the commercial return” from licensing because of “a common reluctance to report relatively low direct revenues, often attributable to a fear that management will perceive the activity as not worth it (and hence it may put jobs at risk)”.[5] Interviews revealed one instance of a job reduction among GLAMs that dedicate collections to the public domain. However, the position itself was not tied to generating revenue and instead was focused on tasks like asset management, online publication and managing volunteers who contributed to data management and publishing collections. Another instance of restructuring revealed the GLAM was able to point to their CC0 policy to make the case for why a job was no longer needed and transferred the person to a different role. Some felt advocating for open access can put an individual’s job at risk where assertions are not given around staff reassignment.
In addition, the “challenging economic and policy environment” noted by the report has since grown more dire with COVID-19 and government pressures to self-generate revenue.[6] The choice to forgo licensing revenue, however small, is made more difficult by pressures from legislators and Governments to generate income, no matter the business model.[7] This is discussed further in Section 5. However, an obligation or need to generate income, or the ability to demonstrate profits from licensing, cannot be exchanged for the legal conditions necessary for a valid copyright to arise. As discussed above, works must be sufficiently original for copyright to subsist. Only then are copyright licensing fees and business models justified and legal.
Together, the above conditions indicate it is unlikely that resolution on this issue will come from legal or voluntary actions.
- ↑ https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/nmdc_report_striking_the_balance_4
- ↑ https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/user/richard_stephens_2#foi_requests
- ↑ https://www.ancestry.com/
- ↑ https://www.findmypast.com
- ↑ https://www.nationalmuseums.org.uk/media/documents/publications/striking_the_balance.pdf, p. 30
- ↑ https://www.nationalmuseums.org.uk/media/documents/publications/striking_the_balance.pdf, p. 4
- ↑ https://www.theartnewspaper.com/comment/dcms-leaked-letter-museums
