Lopez Media Counsel advises museums, publishers, and archives on image rights, content governance, and complex permissions challenges. We help you address rights problems earlier — before they delay publications, complicate exhibitions, or create institutional risk.
Get in touch →Rights questions in visual media are rarely simple. A publication moves forward without clear image documentation. An exhibition hits clearance problems six months before opening. A digitization initiative stalls on orphan works. An AI content policy creates new legal exposure nobody has mapped yet.
Most institutions bring in help when a problem has already surfaced. We work upstream — helping you build the frameworks, workflows, and decision-making practices that make rights problems easier to find and cheaper to solve.
Lopez Media Counsel pairs deep institutional rights expertise with the kind of systems and product thinking that turns one-off solutions into repeatable ones. We don't just clear the rights. We help you build the practice.
We evaluate your permissions workflows, rights documentation, and metadata practices to identify legal and operational risk before it surfaces at the wrong moment. Deliverables are practical — findings your team can act on, not a report that lives in a folder.
We advise on rights-sensitive projects across publication, exhibition, and digital initiatives — from a single complex clearance to institution-wide content governance frameworks. We work through difficult decisions with rigor, clarity, and practical judgment about what actually matters.
For organizations that need senior-level rights expertise without a full-time hire, we provide ongoing counsel on a retained basis. You get a trusted advisor your team can reach when questions come up — and a partner who understands how your institution works, not just how rights work in the abstract.
We support complex image research and permissions execution on projects where subject matter expertise matters: orphan works analysis, multi-party permissions, and rights research for high-stakes publications and exhibitions.
Museums and cultural institutions. University and scholarly publishers. Archives and special collections. Research institutes. Creative and editorial teams.
Cleared reproduction rights for more than 600 works for a landmark exhibition on LGBTQ+ history. The project required navigating complex permissions across private collections, institutional archives, and estates — including works with contested, unclear, or restricted rights. Managing rights at this scale, for material of this sensitivity, required both deep archival research and careful negotiation with rights holders across the country.
Rights research and clearance for The Scores Project: Essays on Experimental Notation in Music, Art, Poetry, and Dance, 1950–1975 — a Getty open-access publication featuring more than 2,800 images, audio recordings, video files, and interactive content alongside a print edition. The publication examines experimental scores by John Cage, George Brecht, Alison Knowles, Allan Kaprow, and other artists central to Fluxus, neo-avant-garde, and intermedia movements.
The rights challenges here were structural: the source materials are ephemera — scores, notations, performance documents — with fragmented provenance distributed across private collections, archives, and estates. For many objects, rights ownership had never been formally established. Clearing 2,800+ assets for open-access release required tracing copyright from first principles across multiple formats and jurisdictions.
Cleared images for press across nearly 100 museums and cultural venues throughout Southern California for Pacific Standard Time — the landmark initiative exploring artistic and cultural exchange between Los Angeles and the Pacific Rim. Managing rights for a project at this geographic and institutional scale, involving scores of concurrent exhibitions and events, required coordinating permissions across a vast range of collections, estates, and institutional rights holders on an accelerated timeline.
Rights evaluation across online exhibitions, print publications, and the museum's permanent collection — assessing the rights status of collection items to determine what could be released publicly online. At an institution with a mandate for broad public access, and collections that include sensitive and contested materials, getting rights wrong has real institutional and reputational consequences. We helped the museum navigate that intersection with rigor and care.
Rights clearance for a major MoMA publication on Marcel Duchamp — a project made more difficult by a moving target: the image list kept changing as the publication developed, against a deadline that didn't. Clearing rights for Duchamp involves its own set of challenges given estate complexity and the volume of institutional and private lenders involved. We managed the full permissions process through multiple rounds of changes and delivered on time.
Pauline founded Lopez Media Counsel in 2012 after more than a decade working inside some of the country's most significant cultural institutions.
She began her career at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, where she built copyright workflows, researched orphan works for public release, and licensed archival film and television to distributors including Turner Classic Movies, Criterion Collection, and Milestone Film & Video. She then joined the J. Paul Getty Museum as Assistant Registrar for Rights and Reproductions — negotiating reproduction rights, evaluating fair use, and managing the digital rights process for the museum's collections and publications. From there she served as Rights and Permissions Manager at the Walker Art Center, overseeing licensing for the landmark International Pop exhibition and managing an active film performance program that included over forty films.
Since founding Lopez Media Counsel, Pauline has worked with some of the most respected institutions in American cultural life — from the Smithsonian to the Guggenheim to multiple departments of the Getty Trust. Her practice spans image rights and clearance, rights governance, digital asset management, and emerging questions around AI-generated content and provenance.
Alongside her institutional client work, Pauline has spent a decade managing digital assets at enterprise scale — bringing a systems-level understanding of content governance that few rights specialists can match. It's a rare combination: the institutional literacy of someone who has run rights departments inside major museums, and the operational experience of someone who has managed content at a scale most institutions will never approach.
She holds an M.A. in Film & Media Studies from UC Santa Barbara and a B.A. in Art History from Smith College.
Noah brings 15 years of product strategy and systems thinking to Lopez Media Counsel.
His career spans Fortune 50 enterprises and high-growth companies — building commerce and platform systems at Meta, designing B2B2C infrastructure at Oura Ring, leading discovery and conversion products at eBay, and modernizing content infrastructure at Gap. He has spent his career taking complex operational challenges and building the systems, workflows, and frameworks that make them manageable at scale.
At Lopez Media Counsel, Noah provides the operational and strategic layer that makes rights advisory more than a one-off engagement. Where Pauline brings institutional depth and subject matter expertise, Noah brings the product discipline to turn that expertise into repeatable systems — governance frameworks that hold, workflows that scale, and recommendations that organizations can actually implement. He has worked as both an embedded product leader at major enterprises and as a fractional product executive for smaller organizations, which is precisely the model Lopez Media Counsel offers its clients.
Noah holds an M.A. from UC Santa Barbara and a B.A. from the University of Arizona.
Most rights issues don't announce themselves. They surface at the wrong moment — when a publication is at press, when an exhibition is about to open, when a digital initiative is already live. We help clients get ahead of them.
Contact us to discuss your project →