Rights in digital art

Copyright shapes how an artwork can be shown, studied, preserved, circulated, and transformed. Artists, collectors, and museums hold different responsibilities for those uses. A public license can make the terms legible in advance. This handbook explains the rights language the 6529 Network Museum is likely to encounter and how each term bears on museum work and public reuse.

Copyright in brief

Copyright generally begins when an original work is fixed in a form from which it can be perceived or reproduced. Berne Convention countries protect works without requiring registration or another formality. National law determines the details, duration, exceptions, and remedies.

Copyright commonly gives its owner control over reproduction, distribution, public display or performance, and the preparation of adaptations. These rights can be licensed separately. Some countries also recognize moral rights, including an artist's claim to authorship and protection against prejudicial alteration.

Ideas, systems, procedures, and methods are distinct from the particular expression that copyright protects. A generative artwork may contain several protected layers: source code, visual output, sound, text, typefaces, a user interface, documentation, and third-party libraries or assets. One rights label should be applied only to the components it actually covers.

Two useful starting points

Buying the artwork usually does not buy its copyright

A collector can own an object while the artist owns copyright in the work it embodies. Museums have worked with that division for generations: a museum may own a painting while the artist or the artist's estate controls reproduction rights. Digital art follows the same basic pattern. The token, the work, and copyright are separate interests unless an agreement joins them.

A collector may own the token, its place in an edition, and the associated files or records, subject to the governing terms. Copyright ownership answers who controls certain uses of the artistic expression.

The public domain is where much of art history lives

The public domain is neither an exceptional nor a suspect condition. Copyright lasts for a limited term. When that term ends, the work becomes available for people to reproduce, study, publish, reinterpret, and place in new works.

Leonardo's Mona Lisa, Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring, Hokusai's Under the Wave off Kanagawa, and Van Gogh's The Starry Night are familiar examples of works whose copyrights have expired. Their presence in books, classrooms, films, scholarship, posters, and digital archives shows what the public domain does: it keeps cultural inheritance available for new attention.

A particular photograph, scan, edition, or website may raise a separate rights or contract question. The status of that file should not be confused with the status of the underlying artwork. The Public Domain Mark helps institutions communicate a reviewed worldwide public-domain determination. CC0 lets a rights holder place a newer work as fully as possible into that field of free use.

The token and the work

An NFT identifies a token on a blockchain. It may point to media or help prove the history of a transaction. Copyright in the associated artwork remains a separate legal interest. A token sale transfers copyright only when an effective agreement says so.

That distinction has practical consequences. A collector may own the token while the artist retains copyright. The artist may give every holder a public license, grant narrower holder rights, or make no additional grant. Platform terms may supply another part of the answer. The controlling evidence should travel with the work: the exact license text, its version, the metadata in which it appeared, the relevant platform terms, and any signed agreement.

The 2024 joint study by the United States Copyright Office and Patent and Trademark Office identified public education and product transparency as central responses to confusion about NFTs and intellectual property. This handbook treats clear rights information as part of the work's public record.

Four questions to ask

Who owns the relevant right?

The artist is often the first copyright owner, although employment, commissioning terms, collaboration, and earlier transfers can change that answer. A licensor can grant only rights that the licensor holds or is authorized to grant.

What exactly is covered?

The answer may be the rendered image, the live program, the source code, the sound, the text, or some combination. Dependencies and contributed elements may have their own licenses. The Museum records components separately when their terms differ.

What permission applies?

A Creative Commons license supplies public permission under stated conditions. CC0 is a dedication and fallback license. The Public Domain Mark reports a status. RightsStatements.org terms help cultural institutions report copyright and reuse status; they are not licenses. A custom agreement must be read on its own terms. Silence supplies no public license to the world. It does not prevent the lawful owner of a work from collecting, displaying, documenting, studying, and caring for it in the ordinary course of museum practice.

What else remains?

Copyright is one part of the picture. Trademark, patent, privacy, publicity, moral rights, contract, cultural-heritage law, and rules concerning personal data may still matter. A license may also leave uses permitted by copyright exceptions untouched.

Reading the Creative Commons family

Creative Commons offers six current 4.0 International licenses. Their names state the conditions:

• BY: Attribution. Credit the creator, retain supplied notices, link to the license, and identify changes.
• SA: ShareAlike. A shared adaptation must use the same or a compatible license.
• NC: NonCommercial. The licensed use must not be primarily directed toward commercial advantage or monetary compensation. The user's nonprofit status does not settle the character of the use.
• ND: NoDerivatives. Unadapted material may be shared. Adapted material may be made privately, but the license does not permit it to be shared.

The six combinations are CC BY, CC BY-SA, CC BY-ND, CC BY-NC, CC BY-NC-SA, and CC BY-NC-ND. The 4.0 licenses permit technical changes needed to exercise their licensed rights. They also prohibit downstream legal or technical restrictions that would prevent another person from using the licensed material on the same terms.

Creative Commons licenses are designed to endure. Once applied by an authorized rights holder, a 4.0 license cannot be revoked for people who continue to comply. An artist may stop distributing new copies under that license or offer different terms in parallel, while existing licensed copies retain the original grant.

Older, ported, or jurisdiction-specific Creative Commons licenses are separate legal instruments. The Museum records the exact version and jurisdiction. It does not silently translate an older license into 4.0.

CC0 and the Public Domain Mark

CC0 1.0 lets a rights holder waive copyright and related rights as fully as the law permits. It includes a broad fallback license where a waiver cannot take effect. CC0 does not require attribution, although museums should still credit the artist and describe changes as a matter of scholarship.

Public Domain Mark 1.0 is used for a work believed to be free of known copyright restrictions worldwide. It does not waive rights or grant a license. The mark follows a copyright determination; it does not create one.

When no public license is stated

The Museum treats a protected work with no identified public license as an in-copyright work. That classification concerns copyright ownership and public reuse. The work remains available for collection display and study.

A lawfully acquired artwork belongs in the collection. Museums ordinarily display such works, publish collection records with faithful identification views, reproduce them where necessary for criticism and scholarship, and make controlled copies needed for preservation. In the United States, ownership of a lawfully made physical copy carries a statutory right to display that copy to viewers present at its location. In the United Kingdom, public exhibition of an artistic work is generally outside the acts restricted by copyright. Online documentation, scholarship, and digital preservation draw on licenses, agreements, fair use or fair dealing, statutory exceptions, and the professional practices developed by museums for their public mission.

Digital and NFT works require the same separation of questions. The token does not transfer copyright by itself. Yet a network-native work was made to be seen through code, files, and public network references. Its acquisition, artist instructions, mint terms, canonical presentation, and ordinary mode of viewing form part of the Museum's basis for faithful display. The Museum records those facts as evidence for presentation, scholarship, and care.

The closer review belongs at the edge of ordinary museum use. Public remixes, merchandise, advertising, image licensing, endorsement, high-resolution substitute files, and uses governed by a contrary artist, donor, lender, or acquisition agreement each require their own basis. Faithful technical migration for conservation is recorded as stewardship; a new artistic work is treated as an adaptation.

Rights statements used by cultural institutions

RightsStatements.org publishes twelve standardized labels for cultural heritage collections. Five concern works in copyright, four concern works outside copyright with remaining limits or a jurisdictional boundary, and three describe unresolved status. They give visitors a concise status signal and a stable URI. The detailed Museum rights record remains the place for the underlying evidence, permissions, restrictions, and component-level detail.

These statements describe rights status and reuse conditions. “In Copyright” assumes that the institution has a basis for making the item available. “Copyright Not Evaluated” and “Copyright Undetermined” describe the state of research. “No Known Copyright” records a reasoned conclusion without presenting it as certainty. The Museum pairs each label with the evidence supporting display, documentation, scholarship, preservation, and broader reuse.

The rights registry in this repository contains all twelve statements and links to their official definitions. A rights statement should appear close to the object it describes.

A practical route through the handbook

• Artists can use Rights for artists to choose terms, prepare metadata, and separate the rights in a token, artwork, code, and dependencies.
• Collectors can use Rights for collectors to understand display, sharing, lending, donation, and preservation.
• The machine-readable registry contains every supported term, a Museum-use table, official URIs, and object assignments.
• Exact English legal texts for CC0 1.0 and the six Creative Commons 4.0 licenses are retained in docs/rights/legal-texts.

Sources and scope

This handbook is educational. Copyright is territorial, and a real use may turn on facts or law beyond a short guide. The Museum publishes the evidence behind its own determinations so that the conclusion can be examined.

Primary sources:

• WIPO, summary of the Berne Convention
• U.S. Copyright Office, Copyright Basics
• U.S. Copyright Office, What is Copyright?
• U.S. Copyright Office and USPTO, Non-Fungible Token Study
• College Art Association, Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for the Visual Arts
• United States Copyright Act, section 109(c)
• UK Intellectual Property Office, public exhibition of copyright works
• Creative Commons, About CC Licenses
• Creative Commons, NonCommercial interpretation
• Creative Commons, CC0 1.0
• Creative Commons, Public Domain Mark 1.0
• RightsStatements.org, Documentation
• RightsStatements.org, Usage Guidelines
• RightsStatements.org, where statements apply

Revision history

• 1.0.1 - 2026-08-15: copy-edited the public Research edition for direct museum language; no rights determination, legal source, or reuse condition changed.
• 1.0.0 - 2026-08-03: initial public handbook.