A lexicon for digital rights

The Space has been consulting with arts organisations and practitioners across the arts and cultural sector since late 2017 in order to provide more guidance on the topic of digital rights. The desire to offer audiences greater digital and online access to their work, and an increased focus on digital audience development from UK public funders to increase both engagement and reach, led to the identification of two clear needs from the sector:

• a greater understanding of intellectual property rights when seeking to publish creative work digitally, and
• simplification and clarity around terminology and the different uses on digital platforms: – to make contracting contributors, creators and existing copyright holders easier.

Through negotiations with rights representatives and  talent unions, it was negotiated as a sensible starting point, to set out some common terminology and example definitions, or a ‘lexicon’ of different digital uses and rights, which has now been signed off by all of the major rights holders and which we are publishing here. We hope you find it useful.

It is important to stress that the intention of this terminology is not to undermine the current rights framework or Union agreements where digital use rights are already in place. Rather, it is to hopefully complement them, by identifying the primary online uses and rights increasingly required by cultural organisations and developing some common language around them, which may be referred to and/or negotiated where not already covered under existing agreements.

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