Be-MUSIC – online sound archives and the intellectual property rights

Databases are fundamental cornerstones for research and understanding in the field of musical traditions. The Be-Music project will bring together the digitized music collections (photos instrument, field photos, records, and sound recordings) housed at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) in Tervuren and the Brussels Museum of Musical Instruments (RMAH-MIM) into a new, multi-lingual information platform for musical heritage.
One of the major challenges facing scientific institutions when putting intangible collections online is to establish good practice in terms of current law and ethics. The sound archives preserved in Belgium represent the musical heritage of the former Belgian colonies, the legitimacy of which in terms of ownership or representation is regularly contested.
In this presentation, we will address the methodological issues of copyright and intellectual property of sound archives with a view to decolonisation processes, and the creation of a national platform using crowdsourcing tools. The aim is to question the notion of legal ownership of sound archives through the legal frameworks used by cultural institutions to put their collections online. We also want to look at the moral and/or emotional issues involved in (re)appropriating cultural heritage.