Rights to remember?: how copyrights complicate media design

Abstract

This paper argues that copyright issues are an overlooked factor in the design of digital participation platforms for audiovisual cultural heritage. Digitization of cultural heritage is an endeavor that aims to preserve and make digital culture available for an engaged online participation, but in practice we see that content copyrights frustrate this aim. Discussing the design process behind the EUscreen portal, and presenting a survey that guided its development, the article shows how copyrights become a driver of the design process and override goals of human-centered and participatory design, and design for collective action. Rather than design-after-design the project became a design-after-rights exercise in which the copyrights of digital cultural heritage placed tight constraints on both the content use and selection, and the platform design itself.