As the de-facto “techie” on staff at my institution, a question I am asked frequently is what I am doing to protect our digital assets from unauthorized use and theft. This is often a trick question for me, one which requires me to put on my diplomacy hat and assure them that I am doing my best to protect our assets while trying to educate the asker about the current copyright climate and its probable long-term damaging effects on culture and cultural institutions.

When Napster first arrived on the scene in 1999, I fit the target demographic – college student, mid-twenties, DSL subscriber. Napster was amazing!! Not only was I able to hear whole albums I couldn’t afford to experience otherwise, I was able to browse other users’ hard drives for bands I’d never heard of. I would notice that I was downloading a lot of The Cure from one person, finger through their holdings, see they had a lot of Covenant or de/Vision and grab those as well. Ultimately, when I had some cash in hand, I’d go shopping for those albums I’d downloaded, preferring to have them on an actual CD. But one of the most interesting things about Napster was the fact that many artists wanted me to distribute their music! On a number of occasions, I would receive messages from the artists themselves, thanking me for uploading their music.

Eventually, the RIAA and the MPAA got into the game and Napster became a dangerous place to be. Now, don’t get me wrong. I understand their position and feel for the artists (who aren’t making nearly as much profit from their albums as one might think, according to Courtney Love in 2000 and the Dresden Dolls in 2007). However, the experience I related above is one that was echoed by many of my friends. They all ended up spending more money on CDs, too, when they could share and discover new music.

These days, though, it seems as if the illegal downloading demographic downloads as a way to thumb their nose at the authority figures of the RIAA and MPAA. The heavy-handed enforcement of current copyright laws has left many people feeling disillusioned with the industry.

My concern for museums is that if we adopt a too-strict enforcement of copyright for our digital assets, not only will we hinder the armchair scholar 3000 miles away, we will also push away the youth who are already grumbling about not being able to grab and use data as they like. The danger of acting like a too-strict parent is that your teenagers will do what they like out of spite. On the flip side, being too indulgent opens you up to being run over with a locomotive.

This is essentially the argument I give my superiors when asked about what I am doing to protect our assets. I point out that if we are too restrictive, our future visitors won’t learn about us, we will hobble the efforts of scholarship, and our digitization efforts won’t be as effective toward fulfilling our mission (not to mention that if someone wants to grab an image of something, there’s that handy Print Screen key…). However, I promote reasonable restrictions on reproduction and the ability to download reproduction-quality, high-resolution images from our (future) website. I embed our images with metadata as best as I can without a DAMS. I will also advocate that we adopt Creative Commons licensing for our online collection gallery.

I know that this is a big topic for many, many, many museums, and while I see that a lot of museum-tech professionals have their finger on the pulse of the copyright climate, I have to wonder if this issue is something of a minefield for other museums as well.

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