A Study On The Licensing Of Images In Museum Collections Under Copyright Law

Museums' collection image licensing refers to the business model that museums license the digital image resources of collections to the authorized person.Its licensing object is the image information formed after Collections are digitized.The legal nature of image licensing is copyright licensing.Its premise is that museums have copyrights in collection images.Whether museums have copyrights in collection images depends on two aspects: first,in subject,whether museums are copyright owners;second,in object,whether collection images are objects of protection of copyright law.There may be two kinds of copyrights in the of images licensing of museums: copyrights in collections and copyright in collection images.As far as collections are concerned,Copyrights in collections still under protection belong to authors in principle.Successors of authors of collections may,in accordance with the law,acquire the copyright of collections.Donors or sellers of collections are not necessarily copyright owners.As for copyrights in collection images,because collection images are special works for hire,museums can directly enjoy the copyright of collection images.The legal basis of image licensing is that these images are protected by copyright law,that is to say,these images must be works.However,collection images are not necessarily works.Plane scanned images and images of three-dimensional digital model do not belong to works.Three-dimensional digital models do not belong to works too.Whether collection images collected by digital camera are photographic works is related to the originality identification of photographic works.If it is not works that is accurately photographed,it will always bring new works to the public,so it have originality;if it is works that is accurately photographed,the result is uncertain.We need to distinguish between stereoscopic collections and plane collections.In general,images of planar collections are not original;whether images of stereoscopic collections are original still needs to be judged by the expression effect of the photos themselves.In addition,if there are theme creative collection images,whether objects photographed are planar collections or stereoscopic collections,they all have originality.In practice,some museums break through the limitation of copyright law through contracts and force users to admit that all images of collections in museums have copyrights.On the one hand,it violates the legality of copyright,reverses the right allocation mechanism,and destroys the purpose of incentive information output of copyright law.On the other hand,protection of debt law is not suitable for collection images.Because it ignores the certainty,independence and value of images themselves.In addition,due to the relativity of the contract,this kind of protection can not be against the third party.The production of museums' collection images needs much technical input and labor cost.Although some images can not be protected by copyright law because they don not have originality,through the creation of neighboring right,we can bring these labor achievements with low or even non originality into the copyright law system.In this way,they can obtain absolute right protection,which is the legal basis of museum image licensing.Compared with plate right,neighboring right of ordinary photos is more suitable for the protection and licensing of non original collection images.Considering the public welfare nature of museums,in addition to commercial licensing,museums also need to open free licensing,so as to realize the purpose of museum social education.The design of free licensing system can refer to the following points: first,the quality of image data provided by commercial licensing and free licensing should be differentiated;second,users of commercial licensing and free licensing are divided;third,when museums provide free resources to the public,they can adopt the mode of CC license agreement for the images protected by copyright law,and they can not impose restrictions on the use of images not protected by the copyright law.