Original illustration by Davide Bonazzi for CopyrightUser.org
On 20 December 2022 (16:00-17:00 UK time), ReCreating Europe and the Europeana Copyright Community are joining forces to offer a ‘Policy Office Hours’ online session on Best Practices in Creative Reuse for Immersive Experiences. The online session is free to attend and open to artists, curators, cultural heritage practitioners and anyone with an interest in copyright and digital cultural heritage.
As part of the ReCreating Europe consortium and taking inspiration from the US Codes of Best Practices in Fair Use, CREATe (University of Glasgow) and IViR (University of Amsterdam) have developed two codes of best practices in creative reuse: one for documentary filmmakers and one for curators of immersive experiences. The project aimed to give sector-specific content and meaning to copyright exceptions and other permitted uses of copyright works with a view to helping creators within these sectors make informed decisions around the reuse of protected materials.
The project started with a series of online workshops aimed at capturing the most pressing copyright-related issues and concerns faced by these creative communities in the UK and the Netherlands. The findings of those workshops are summarised in these issue reports.
In 2022, the team conducted online deliberative exercises with the same participants with the goal of establishing from the bottom-up what should constitute fair practice when reusing existing audiovisual materials in a documentary film or an immersive experience. The data collected through these exercises have been used to develop the codes of best practices, which are available at the following links:
- Code of Best Practices on Creative Reuse for Documentary Filmmakers
- Code of Best Practices on Creative Reuse for Immersive Experiences
Rather than highlighting the differences between the two jurisdictions, the Codes attempt to bridge legal traditions by focusing on what the law permits in both the UK and the Netherlands.
The project has been successfully presented on several occasions, including the webinar Building Copyright Literacy for a Global Community of Open Educators with the Code of Best Practice in Fair Use for OER (online, 11 June 2021, recording available here); the panel ‘Fair Use’ for Documentary Film Archive at the Docs Ireland Documentary Film Festival (Belfast, 2 July 2022); the conference Rethinking Copyright Flexibilities (Nicosia, 1 November 2022); and more recently the public symposium EUscreen 2022: Tranlsating Media Pasts (Prague, 9 December 2022).
The Policy Office Hours online session on 20 December (4pm UK time) will offer an opportunity to discuss the Code of Best Practices for Immersive Experiences with the researchers who developed it. Everyone is very welcome to join with any type of question, thought or concern they may have on this topic. You can register for free at the following link: https://pro.europeana.eu/event/policy-office-hours-subject-best-practices-in-creative-reuse-for-immersive-experiences