Digitization and provision of (still) rights-protected objects between normative orders and legal design – science-based recommendations and courses of action for cross-sectoral practice

Together with numerous public initiatives and the activities of Google Books, the systematic funding actions of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) are enabling archives, li-braries and museums to make an ever broader range of digitized historical sources available to researchers in open access. In view of the comparatively favourable situation for works from the period before 1918, there is a growing expectation on the research side that collect-ing institutions should also comprehensively digitize their more recent holdings and make them available for academic purposes under the most liberal conditions possible. However, the increased demand resulting from the pluralization of digital research methods is countered by commercial interests and a variety of legal hurdles, which are primarily of a copyright na-ture, but also concern private and data protection law, among others.
In order to provide archives, libraries and museums with a corridor for action to close this gap in a legally secure manner and at the same time to give the DFG precise orientation in the design of its funding programme prepared by the pilot phase, the proposed project aims to scientifically survey the legal framework conditions, risks and design options for the digitiza-tion and research-related provision of (still) legally protected objects. At the centre of this pilot project is the multimedia estate of photographer and filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl (? 2003), which has been jointly managed by the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (SBB), the Kunstbibliothek – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek since 2018 and which must be con-sidered an extremely difficult legacy not only in ethical terms, but also with regard to the nor-mative dimension. To complete the overall picture from a material and legal perspective, the project also aims to include contemporary art, particularly from the Nationalgalerie’s perma-nent collection at Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, as well as sound re-cordings and other database works from the estate of the internationally renowned conductor Claudio Abbado (? 2014), which is also kept at the SBB.