Digitization, Public Domain & Informational Monopolies

Posted . Filed under Creative Industries, Emergent Technologies, Forthcoming event, Mass Digitization, Symposia.

Thursday 10 April 2014

Executive Business Centre, Bournemouth University

Digitization of library material, archives and museum collections, arts organizations repositories is progressing rapidly, and opens up new possibilities of accessing, using and re-using the knowledge embodied in cultural heritage. By giving new purpose and function to works, it enhances the value of the public domain and enriches the public sphere. However, digitization also creates the conditions for the rise of new proprietary entitlements over cultural objects. Such ‘informational monopolies’ are often justified as necessary to recoup the high costs of digitization, or as the basis to provide additional sources of income for the cultural institutions. At the same time, however, they may impact upon creativity, research and innovation in new and unexpected ways.This event will address the intersection of digitization, public domain and digital monopolies from a legal and economic perspective. Case studies, approaches and methodologies will be discussed, with the view of providing an up-to-date understanding of the policy implications of digitization.

Programme

9.30 Registration
10.00 Welcome address (S. Weston, M. Borghi)

10.15 Digitization and the copyright mandate: solutions in search of a problem?

Chair: Martin Kretschmer (CREATe, University of Glasgow)

  • Ronan Deazley and Victoria Stobo (CREATe, University of Glasgow) To search or not to search? Digitising archive collections in the new copyright settlement (Download slides here)
  • Cédric Manara (Google) What we can learn from the Google Books project and ruling
  • Uma Suthersanen (Queen Mary, University of London) Who Cares About the Orphans? Institutional and Authorial Mandates

11.30 Break

11.45 Use and re-use of digital objects

Chair: Roger Brownsword (King’s College London and Bournemouth University)

  • Nora McGregor (British Library) The Mechanical Curator Experiment at British Library (Download slides here)
  • Darren Wright (FreeBMD) Digitisation: Open Access to Public History (Download slides here)
  • Dinusha Mendis (Bournemouth University) Back to the Future: The use and re-use of objects through 3D Printing (Download slides here)

13.00 Lunch

14.15 Policy implications and the economic impact of digitization in the creative industries

Chair: Ruth Towse (Bournemouth University)

  • Piet Bakker (Newspaper Innovation)
  • Trilce Navarrete (University of Amsterdam) Changes in heritage production and consumption brought by networked technologies
  • Christian Handke (Erasmus University, Rotterdam) Digitization and Competitio in Copyright Indistries: One step forward and two steps back? (Download slides here)

15.45 Break

16.00 Who owns knowledge in the mass-digital age?

Chair: Stavroula Karapapa (University of Reading)

  • Lucie Guibault (IViR, University of Amsterdam) Faustian Perspective on Digitization: Making a Deal with the Devil (Download slides here)
  • Maurizio Borghi (Bournemouth University) Digital monopolies: how they are caused and how to unlock them (Dowload slides here)
  • Jean-Claude Guédon (University of Montreal) Post-Foucaldian musings about digitization: power, knowledge and mass digitization

17.15 Cocktail