Museums and Copyright Ownership: Is Ignorance Really Bliss?

Abstract

Museums face intellectual property issues daily—particularly copyright concerns. While museums may have ownership of a particular work, they often do not know who owns the copyright and what rights that gives them. Copyright owners are given the exclusive rights to reproduce, adapt, distribute, publicly perform, and publicly display their works. U.S. Copyright law, with its origin in the U.S. Constitution, is governed by the Copyright Acts of 1909 and 1976. Under these acts copyright ownership is granted usually to the artist who creates the work, but may be extended to others when specific requirements are met. Iowa artist Grant Wood, founder of the Regionalist Art Movement, can be considered a poster child for copyright issues. The rights in many of his works are policed by a professional intellectual property licensing organization. Here we review three instances where Wood's work has been at the center of copyright ownership debates, in a public domain question, in a work for hire situation, and in a transfer of copyright ownership. These case studies serve as useful examples for museums confronting their own copyright ownership concerns.