Many media archivists struggle with copyright issues and intellectual property law in the broader sense. In particular, the uncertainty about this prevents them from quickly sharing archive material with potentially high social value online. Less experienced web editors or program makers sometimes even don’t know where to start.

In 2017, the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision (NISV) developed and started working with a flowchart for online publication and accompanying rights forms for internal use. This instrument was presented at the 2017 FIAT/IFTA World Conference in Mexico at received with wide acclaim. Following this success and recognizing the great potential for the wider media archives community, the FIAT/IFTA Value, Use and Copyright Commission (VUC) decided to collaborate with NISV to make this instrument usable for a larger audience via translations, an explanatory guide and a case study.

FIAT/IFTA is now proud to make this instrument available:

• The Copyright Clarification Flowchart, available in English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Catalan and Spanish.
• A case study by Maartje Hülsenbeck, copyright lawyer at NISV and FIAT/IFTA VUC member.