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Appl. Sci. 2021, 11, 9931 8 of 19 4. Monetising Museum Images: NFTs, Image Licensing and Copyright 4.1. NFTs and Revenue Generation from Museum Images Despite the fact that NFTs are a nascent technology and cultural heritage institutions are not usually amongst the earliest adopters of bleeding-edge technologies (which can be attributed to the fact that museums traditionally have limited budgets to experiment with new technologies and only few and well-resourced museums have the privilege of in-house technology teams), museums have already started exploring the possibilities of crypto collectibles for revenue generation, as well as for sourcing funds for social impact projects. As early as March 2021, the Guggenheim advertised a job post for a candidate who would look into the potential of NFTs [85], whilst the Cultural Producer and Former Deputy Director of the San Jose Museum of Art, along with other museum delegates, participated in the webinar “Discussing & Debating the Potentials of NFTs in the Museum Sector” [86]. The first large-scale institution to embrace NFTs was, what is considered by some as the “world’s best art gallery” [87], i.e., the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. In an effort to recover some of the revenue lost due to the pandemic, the Uffizi Gallery took the decision to create and sell NFTs of digitised images of some of its iconic pieces [88]. On the 14 May 2021, the gallery sold its first NFT of Michelangelo’s “Doni Tondo”, for 170,000 USD [9]. Following in the Uffizi’s footsteps, in July 2021, the Hermitage Museum in Russia announced it would sell NFTs of digital copies of some of its masterpieces on the Binance NFT Marketplace, including works by Leonardo Da Vinci, Vincent Van Gogh and Wassily Kandinsky [10]. The museum’s general director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, stated that the Hermitage is “not looking at it as a way of making money” [10], but instead as an opportunity to experiment with this new medium [10]. However, at the same time, the Hermitage stated that they aim to utilise the funds raised to “provide better availability of the Hermitage collection” [89] and to undertake necessary restoration work [90]. The first British museum to embrace NFTs was the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, UK. In July 2021, the gallery sold limited editions of its first NFT, featuring an image of William Blake’s “Ancient of Days”, through the Hic et Nunc platform (www.hicetnunc.xyz/objkt/168856, accessed on 18 October 2021), which operates on the energy-efficient Tezos blockchain [91]. The gallery aims to raise funds for financing” social projects co-produced by the Whitworth and its constituents” instead of funding its own needs and collection [91]. The goal of this experiment, as they describe it, is to “explore the potential of directing new flows of private digitised capital into social capital” [91]. Although NFTs have already shown glimpses of their potential for monetising mu- seum images, sceptics question whether they do so at the expense of an existing and long-utilised source of revenue for digitised collections—that of image licensing. Many museums and galleries have long relied on image licensing as a way to earn significant revenue from their images [92], either through their own in-house operations [93,94], or through image licensing firms such as The Bridgeman Art Library [95]. Using image licensing, museums have been claiming copyright even on images of artworks that are in the public domain, sparking controversy [96]. As a counter-argument, museums claim that revenue from image fees is vital for their collections [92,97]. An exception to this is the Open-GLAM movement, which has made digital images of collections’ items available with a variety of open licenses permitting reuse. There is some justifiable concern that third parties could mint openly licensed images of artworks as NFTs, taking potential revenue from institutions (discussed in Section 5.1) [96,98]. Therefore, it is deemed necessary to ex- plore whether crypto collectibles impact image licensing operations by crystalising matters on NFTs in relation to copyright. 4.2. NFTs and Copyright A common concern amongst sceptics is whether the intellectual property rights of the images featured in NFTs are also part of the trade and therefore museums would risk losing image licensing revenue by venturing in crypto collectibles. Although that is a field that is still being shaped, by general consensus, when it comes to intellectual property rights, thePDF Image | Crypto Collectibles, Museum Funding and OpenGLAM
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