Managerial Approaches to Support Intellectual Property Rights in Museums

Some of the cultural works which are considered as cultural heritage, regardless of their antiquity and precedence, are simultaneously subject of the legal systems of intellectual property rights and cultural heritage law. This situation can lead to a conflict of interest between private ownership and public law which, in turn, may create many problems for the management of cultural heritage when individuals privately own it. This research tries to remedy such problems by introducing solutions for this conflict of interest without any prejudice to the artists’ rights or the public bodies, the representatives of the society, who are the cultural heritage authorities. From the other side, nowadays many museums utilize modern data technologies as a result of advancement in computer and communication sciences. They publish their artistic works in digital version through the internet. In this way, the data and works are easily accessible. Albeit the new technologies facilitate access to and sharing images, videos, archives, books and historical documents, have also created new challenges especially for identification of owners of the said properties. In the cultural heritage realm, there are many reasons to copy human-made artefacts and relicts either for presentation in museums or for research purposes. Among other things, copyright is one of the most disturbing obstacles to developing digital museums. Copyright faces with numerous confrontations as it can be effortlessly violated. Besides, digital items enjoy less stability because they can be simply copied from a distance. Several users can concurrently use them with ease. Consequently, the cultural heritage authorities should try to implement measures for preventing the violence of copyright. In the end, this paper reaches to the conclusion that management and protection of intellectual properties which also enjoy heritage capacity lead to complicated and multi-faceted problems as they embrace social, historical, cultural, legal and political aspects. On that account, to manage the accessibility and utilization of such collections, all aspects, as mentioned earlier, should be relatively known and taken into consideration. Accordingly, the museums need precise and pre-determined policies and solutions for the proper execution of their tasks, especially when it comes to the management of their intellectual properties. These solutions should assist the museums in meeting their goals and fulfilling their duties. In doing so, the principle of least intervention, management of digital law and monitoring the public access to the collections constitute three vital principles which the Cultural Heritage entity should pay attention to.