Out-of-Commerce, Out of Mind: Widening Public Access to Out-of-Commerce Copyright Works in Film Archives through the DSM Directive

Stockton-Brown, Melanie (2021) Out-of-Commerce, Out of Mind: Widening Public Access to Out-of-Commerce Copyright Works in Film Archives through the DSM Directive.

This dataset comes from research that aimed to understand to what extent Art. 8 of the EU Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive 2019 can successfully benefit film archives and the existing practices of film archivists in widening public access to film heritage. The focus is on out of commerce copyright film works. This research complemented the existing literature, through conducting doctrinal and empirical research that generated the necessary understanding of how Art. 8 is likely to be understood and used by film archives. This research found that there are terminology uncertainties, a lack of cultural heritage institute funding, a lack of legal education and knowledge, and competing archival priorities that could hinder the use of Art. 8 in film archival practice. Ethnographic studies were conducted to explore existing film archival practices and therefore how the out-of-commerce provisions might best be incorporated into these practices. The UK’s national film archive the BFI, the Netherland’s national film archive EYE, and a regional UK film archive MACE, were the chosen film archives. This data contains anonymised interview transcripts and an annotated bibliography of publicly available film archival documents.