Copyright is a means of managing the interests of individual authors and thoseof the 'public interest'. In a museum context, copyright is a technical practicewhich illuminates how museums imagine and manage their own organizationallegitimacy ¨C a settlement which has often operated through a 'public interestargument' ('we need you to hand over control of your object/story for the benefitof all'). Drawing on interviews with people who work in museums and those whohave taken part in a museum participation project, we focus on a digitalstorytelling project to show how copyright was deployed to make an in-practiceargument for the how museums might legitimately relate personal story tellingwith the 'public interest'. The project did this through three processes: cominginto the public via managing informed consent through evoking future audiences,making an author through creating intentional decisions and 'responsibilization'and making an object by transforming a digital story into a 'finished' object whichis, in turn, transferred into the museum collections. While those involved in theproject recognized they had signed over the rights to their story and were, in mostcases, broadly happy with this ¨C 'that's what the form was for', as one put it ¨C thepersonal nature of the story itself (linked to personal memories, friends andfamily) and the sociality of the process of making it (in a group; throughinteractions with museum staff) was also emphasized. This sociality wasexpressed in the sense that participants would like to be told when a story is goingto be re-displayed, be sent drafts of interpretation and be invited to the openingof the exhibition ¨C a mode of relationship with the museum consistently describedas 'courtesy'. The article concludes by suggesting that the expectation ofcourtesy ¨C though it might seem like a very modest claim ¨C does something tomuseums and makes way for more nuanced asymmetries within the publicinterest argument. Rather than assuming that 'the public interest' lies in treatingpeople (slightly coldly) in the same way, the lens of courtesy might suggest waysof both respecting the importance of the public ethos (for institutions to addressthemselves to ideas of fairness, inclusion and equality) yet might also work tosocialize this impulse and reimagine a responsive public museum from thebottom up
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