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 Some GLAMs extend these policies to accuracy, deception and reputational damage. The Horniman Museum conditions reuse on “the material being reproduced accurately and not used in a misleading context”. Sir John Soane’s Museum conditions reuse on “the material being reproduced accurately and not used in a misleading context or altered format (such as stretched, compressed, coloured or altered in any way so as to distort its original format)”. In another policy, the Museum permits image cropping but requires written permission for any other changes or modifications. The policy also states “[i]mages may not be used in any way which could be considered to be deceptive or which could reflect unfavourably upon the good name or reputation of Sir John Sloane’s Museum”. In its Academic Licence, the National Portrait Gallery prohibits similar use that is “deceptive or which damages the good name or reputation of the National Portrait Gallery, the artist, or the persons depicted in the images”. It is worth noting that this term applies to scholarly research with which the Gallery might disagree or construe as derogatory to the institution, the artist or even the person depicted in the underlying portrait. Lastly, the Bodleian Libraries prohibits use “which might adversely affect the image, reputation, goodwill, distinctiveness or prestige” of not only the Bodleian Libraries and its collections, but also the University of Oxford.

In reality, it is difficult to know whose moral rights are at the heart of these terms: the underlying author’s or the GLAM’s? At least one example extends this claim to even the persons depicted in the artwork. The combined effect across GLAMs is to significantly limit the ways in which the public can use digital collections for a range of typical purposes, as well as atypical and innovative purposes, like computational data and/or as a medium to create new cultural works and knowledge.



Many policies delineate between images created for the purposes of performing the public task and activities falling outside of it. For those within the public task, some policies create sets of documents, claim IP rights in them, and/or make use of the Re-Use of the Public Sector Information Regulation 2015 exception to commercialise the documents. In practice, this means GLAMs hold back high-resolution images and entire datasets for commercialisation while publishing low resolution images or basic datasets online under various statements and formats. What is defined as ‘high-resolution’ or of commercial value varies by GLAM.

For the British Museum both “low resolution and higher resolution (up to A5 size images)” and “[c]ollection online object data and textual material published on the website” fall “[i]nside the public task and [are] generally available for free non-commercial reuse” via the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence. Also “[i]nside the public task and re-usable for commercial purposes at a charge” are “higher resolution images of the collection,” the fees and terms for which are available through the British Museum Images commercial licensing website. Accordingly, the British Museum considers its digital surrogates as documents created under the public task but makes use of the exemption for documents in which the Museum (allegedly) holds intellectual property rights. Different resolutions are published for public reuse, depending on the reuse purpose. The Museum considers inside the

A Culture of Copyright