Copyright – Ideas in ALL

Social Structures

Author: Marta Arisi, is part of the University of Trento team working for the reCreating Europe Project focusing on GLAM.

Marta Arisi

Open cultural data can be considered an umbrella term referring to anytime data from Cultural Heritage Institutions (“CHIs”) is made available without restrictions, e.g., thanks to open licensing (as the Creative Commons). It often refers to online resources that contain descriptions, metadata, images, etc. Thus, open cultural data is also relevant to the field of digitization of cultural heritage.

“Open” stands for the possibility to access the content freely, and- to re-use it. While there is not an accepted definition, useful examples may come from the Open Data Charter or the definition of openness proposed by the Open Knowledge Foundation. Some projects even address the context of CHIs, such as OpenGLAM.

Social Structures

Author: Péter Mezei, Associate Professor of Law, University of Szeged, Faculty of Law and Political Sciences; adjunct professor (dosentti), University of Turku, Faculty of Law

Péter Mezei

Most of the European Union (EU) legislation on platforms was introduced in a period that we currently call “web 1.0”. During the early years of the internet, websites offered “read only” experience, rather than interactivity and user engagement. The early legislative acts in the USA and the EU have contributed to the emergence of brand-new business models. The platformisation – based on the safe harbours granted for (certain) service providers – has generated a brand new (“read/write”) internet culture, something we refer to as “web 2.0”. For a while, social media’s contribution to modern society was hailed as the new democratisation of life, but those sentiments have since then gone, partially due to platforms’ excessive content moderation practices.

Web 2.0 – coupled with rogue websites’ contribution to illegal end-user activities – have sparked criticism on a global scale. It took many years in Europe to come up with the necessary solutions to mitigate the negative consequences of the platform age. One of the magic keywords for these reforms was the so-called “value gap”, that is, the claim that platforms’ benefits from end-users’ activities is disproportionately greater than the fees they pay to rights holders. Furthermore, as data has become the “oil of our age”, an urgent need has arisen to regulate the collection, management and utility of information.

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