Navigating intellectual property in the landscape of digital cultural heritage sites

Abstract While three-dimensional digital renderings of cultural heritage sites have been developed over the past decades for informational and preservation purposes, the COVID 19 pandemic has demonstrated that the audience for virtual cultural heritage – so-called “technoheritage” – is likely to grow, engaging lay persons and specialist scholars alike through creative renditions and experiences of digital sites. Virtual availability affords democratized access to cultural heritage sites in theory, yet the process of digitizing heritage raises questions of intellectual property rights and how they should be allocated among the various stakeholders, including site stewards and heritage recording organizations. This article untangles these knotty intellectual property issues and posits that the current trend to treat all technoheritage and related data as copyrightable intellectual property is a clunky approach and not legally sound. Understanding the intellectual property in and to technoheritage and addressing intellectual property allocation in the complex manner the law requires are crucial to finding workable solutions that can balance concerns regarding appropriation of cultural heritage with open access to information.