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This report is an analysis of 7 case studies of publicly funded e-content initiatives, which demonstrate the flow of content, value and rights across the respective seven representatives of the Strategic Content Alliance sponsors. It is addressed to senior decision makers across public-sector bodies and aims at providing a coherent account of best practices of managing publicly funded e-content.

Case studies

1. University of Portsmouth: Great Britain Historical Geographic Information Systems

2. University of Southampton: MyExperiment and Open Middleware Infrastructure Institute (OMII)
3. Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery: BMAGIC project
4. National Educational Network/Becta: Gallery and Repurpose Create and Share projects
5. National Library of Health: eLearning Object Repository project
6. British Library: Archival Sound Recordings project
7. British Broadcasting Corporation and Strategic Content Alliance: CenturyShare project

Executive Summary

A finding from analysis of the case studies has revealed that all of them, but particularly the digitisation projects, face problems with respect to the clearance procedures. The current copyright regime is not friendly to this kind of activity that involves high volumes of works with low commercial but high cultural value, that do not have easily identifiable authors. The clearance problems have a direct impact upon the permissions associated with the content that is further disseminated. The institutions performing the digitisation often face severe budgetary limitations or have project management concerns that set limits to what may and what may not be cleared. As a result, some works remain inaccessible to the public. This is particularly true for works in which multiple layers and types of rights exist, and where the value objectives of such projects are mainly cultural and relate to the preservation of the material as well as in its being made available to the research community.

Using the case studies as reference points, the report also identifies and outlines three models of content and permissions flows. Each model is named after the key characteristic of the way in which the flows are structured:

• The ‘Star Shaped’ Model
• The ‘Snow-Flake’ Model
• The ‘Clean Hands’ Model

Such models are illustrative of the ways in which IPR management may enable or hinder the flow of e-content. They also constitute a basic typology of the ways in which different models of IPR management could facilitate different types of value production. This is a vital finding and is substantiated by the indication that each model may be associated with different organisational objectives. Therefore, such models could inform the way in which IPR policy and strategy is formed for organisations across the public sector to assist in planning as well as recognition of the pros and cons, costs and benefits of each approach.

This report also illustrates how identifying and building upon these different modes of copyright management can also contribute to the accomplishment of institutional goals, such as:

• Enabling more efficient and effective sharing of e-content between publicly funded projects and organisations
• Increasing the visibility of publicly funded e-content
• Allowing the audience to share and reuse e-content
• Minimising costs of content aggregation and copyright clearance
• Developing risk management procedures
• Improving the quality of e-content while allowing its open flow and sharing

Finally, the findings and recommendations contained in this report are beneficial to public-sector bodies by providing information on how to:

• Effectively and efficiently plan and implement publicly funded e-content projects
• Understand the needs of the end-user
• Create suitable copyright licensing frameworks to support project or organisational objectives
• Design realistic and sustainable Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) policies
• Reform aspects of the current IPR regulatory regime

Key findings

1. Value does not equal money
   All projects analysed are primarily interested in the production of non-monetary value, as expressed in their cultural, educational, scientific, preservation and public-service objectives
2. Clearing rights costs more than the rights themselves
   In most digitisation projects, the costs of identifying and negotiating with rights owners exceed the costs of acquiring the actual licences.
3. Publicly funded e-content is different from commercial content
   The current UK copyright legislative framework is designed for high-commercial value, easily identifiable content. However, the majority of the e-content managed by public-sector organisations comprises of lowcommercial high-cultural, high-volume content authored by individuals who are very difficult to trace.
4. Education and training are necessary
   The increasing inclusion of User Generated Content (UGC) in collections managed by public-sector organisations makes the education of the general public on issues of copyright as important as that of the organisation’s personnel. While cultural collection have always engaged with audiences, the advent of the internet has rendered the same collections accessible to a far wider, diverse and anonymous audience. In addition, Web 2.0 applications provided the end-user with the ability to actively interact with cultural content. This interaction often involves reproduction or transformation of the original content and consequently requires a basic understanding of the way in which the IPR regulatory framework operates. Hence, the constant education of these new audiences becomes crucial for the success of the cultural objectives of the collection holders and the mitigation of legal risk. Intellectual Property Rights and risk management toolkits, like the ones that SCA has already produced, are really important for organisations managing e-content collections
5. Free content costs
   Open Access, sharing and reuse of e-content are activities that require dedicated curation and continuous update of the collection, as well as conscious community building. UGC acquires value only through active curation that makes its relevance apparent and fully contextualises the contributions of individual users. Because end-users constantly upload and update their content, the curation process needs to be continuous and more intense compared to the curation of a more traditional collection that has longer change cycles. As a result, UGC e-content management may entail greater value creation but also have high maintenance costs.
6. More freedom means more responsibility
   The closer we get to a model of unrestricted sharing and repurposing of content, the greater the need for attribution, quality assurance, source tracing and provenance.
7. There is no ‘one size fits all’ licence
   Different types of content require different types of licences. There is a trend to differentiate between user-generated and professionally created content: the former is usually made freely available for reuse, whereas the latter is treated as premium content that may be used only privately and for non-commercial or educational purposes

Key recommendations

Recommendations to funding bodies

1. Take into consideration the costs of rights clearance procedures, when drafting the funding contracts, as suggested within resource Blueprint for Funding Bodies and Funding Recipients contained within the SCA IPR and Licensing Toolkit.
2. Provide specific funding for the production of IPR and risk management toolkits (or adaptation of existing toolkits, such as those that the SCA has developed) as well as targeted IPR clearance training
3. Create specific funding programmes for increasing the IPR management capacity of public-sector organisations

Recommendations to organisations managing e-content

1. Develop your own risk-mitigation and rights management procedures and tools. These might be based around tools created as part of the SCA IPR Toolkit
2. Develop your own IPR training material or customise the existing ones
3. Train your personnel on IPR-related issues
4. Educate your user base on the ‘Dos’ and ‘Don’ts’ with respect to the content you make available
5. Have an explicit and clear IPR policy and appropriately communicate it to your personnel and users. This might be based upon the template statements produced within the SCA IPR Toolkit
6. Make sure that the End-User Licence Agreements’ terms and conditions are understood by your users.
7. The SCA IPRtToolkit contains a Terminology Toolkit, which defines many of the terms that may be encountered with regards to rights and licences
8. Think of uses of your e-content beyond the boundaries of your own organisation or project
9. Create value-added services for Web 2.0 and open content

Recommendations to policy makers

1. Establish a uniform licensing framework in the publicly funded sector, to avoid licence pollution arising
   from a lack of licence compatibility
2. Consider how best the Copyright legislation could be amended to accommodate orphan works’ and memory institutions’ (museums, libraries, archives) exceptions
3. Develop a single voluntary rights clearance and registration service for e-content produced by publicsector organisations