The Space, in association with Arts Council England are hosting a workshop on digital rights.

This workshop, which complements the Digital Rights Toolkit produced by The Space, was an opportunity to hear from rights experts, dig into the issues that arts organisations and artists encounter when thinking about digital distribution for their work, and learn from strategies and solutions that have worked for other productions.

The workshop included talks, case studies and small group surgeries. It answered questions about current work that needed digital distribution and longer-term plans.

Speakers:

Ben Green, founder of Ben Green Associates. Ben advises on digital rights strategy, negotiation and management. Formerly Head of Rights Business Development at the BBC, he has advised the V&A, Tate Britain and on the musical ‘Lazarus’. Ben outlined what we mean by ‘digital rights’, and what you need to think about whether adapting an existing performance for digital distribution, creating new work for digital or producing marketing content for social sharing.

Music supervisor Alex Hancock. Alex covered the challenges to be aware of when clearing music for use in your work, and ways of overcoming or working round those potential pitfalls. He shared insights from his work in TV, film and the arts from working on the broadcast of Phoenix Dance Theatre’s Windrush: Movement of the People to his efforts to secure the rights to the Soviet Union state anthem for feature film ‘The Death of Stalin’.

Archive researcher Steve Bergson. Steve has worked extensively in TV, film, online publishing and video games. Steve discussed identifying and clearing rights for archive material or existing art works, and creative workarounds and solutions if clearance is unfeasible or unavailable. He discussed his work on Javaad Alipoor’s The Believers Are But Brothers to illustrate specific challenges you might encounter, including use of content from social media and how to proceed when your artistic vision may be at odds with the rights owner’s view.