Hello, these legal issues are really important and I welcome very much this question. I think Marcs statement is clear regarding the status quo, however this status quo certainly does not reflect the actual legal situation. This not only in the case of several bitstreams per item but even with a single bitstream per item. I suspect that the basic aspects are similar across different families of law e.g. anglo-american vs german or roman law and so on. However beware, I am not a lawyer.
I am from germany and we run a repository since several years as a non for profit organisation. We have discussed all aspects of licensing several times througout these years with special consideration of our content being harvested and aggregated by larger cultural organizations. Their required standards impose constraints of what we can do if we want our content to be visible on their platforms. So for us, there are four parties in the game: us, the repository operators; collectors who archive their items in our repository; anonymous visitors who find items and reuse bitstreams/media from these items for their own purposes, possibly republishing content in there own environments and lastly aggregators who harvest large selections or all of our content. There are three different relations/treaties to be considered when it comes to licensing. The first one is the deposit license which is a required license in DSpace and is found in the license.txt. We see this license as a contract between our organization who runs the repository and those named users who deposit their items in our archive. E.g. in this license we state that we have to duplicate data for preservation purposes and the depositors have to allow us to do so for them to be able to archive their items in our repository. The DSpace solution in this regard is good for now, but there are also issues with this, depending on the duration you run a repository. E.g. over the years there might be a need to change this agreement in retrospect. Users are registered, so it is possible to contact most of them, to ask them to change this treaty for items deposited before. Then, license.txt needs to be changed for all items affected. Old items where users could not be reached or even have died in meantime have to be either withdrawn or stay unaltered. In the latter case, one can not change *ALL* license.txt files attached to items remaining as one would do in the first case. This is a curation task currently not easily applied I guess. Also, attaching the license to each item separately might not be the best solution. Instead, agreeing on it once during registration similar to a webshop, which changes its terms of trade from time to time too would be a sensible alternative. The difference between these two solutions might even be considered when searching for evidence for an "AGB" in german law, where other rules apply. Second is the license for the bitstreams. As of today, cultural heritage institutions in Europe tend to ask for a share alike Creative Commons license, possibly with no derivatives restriction but no non commercial limitation IIRC. In any case you can have the requirement of mentioning the authors name (CC by) when reusing media. Marking bitstreams as public domain might make sense just as much to take the burden of duplicate rights research from repository visitors and users of the media. The bitstream license is a treaty between our depositors and the anonymous visitor of our repository. Our depositors, the collectors of cultural goods have strong feelings about attaching a license to bitstreams, even if they dont have any means to enforce them. They would not use our repository to publish their collections if they could not attach such a bitstream license. This license is not depicted at all in DSpace as of now. Common perception of the CC feature in DSpace is not precise I guess. Before we analyzed the current situation thoroughly, we always believed, that the optional CC license that can be attached to an item in DSpace belongs to the bitstream. Now we think, that this is not the case. We dont have the means to resolve this issue in a sensible way as of now within DSpace and as such we go on to treat the CC license step as the license that applies to all bitstreams attached to an item. The third aspect is the licensing of metadata. Building a repository means building a database of metadata, which could be licensed by itself. DSpace does not need to provide any means for this database license. This license for the whole repository could be mentioned on the homepage or somewhere else. However, licensing metadata is an aspect to be considered more indepth because it is not solely a relation between us as the operators of the repository and the aggregators, but also between out depositors and the aggregators. Metadata is created by our depositors which are not neccessarily authors of the items they publish. In our case, they are usually collectors of cultural goods. Metadata usually has no or a very limited level of creative effort. E.g. typing the measurements of a photographic print is certainly no creative work. Describing such a photograph and applying keywords might or might not be a creative work, but most likely at a very limited level. This level of creativity is critical to judge whether there is a copyright on this data at all, that could be licensed. >From a certain point of view, licensing would need to be done not only at item >level but even separately for every data field in a dataset. This is plain >inacceptable in practical terms. Harvestors of cultural institutions expect >metadata to be public domain as a whole. Not even mentioning of authors as in >CC by licenses is manageable for them and honestly, we would not want to make >things that complicated too. If you look closely, then the CC-license that can be optionally attached to items in DSpace is a license for the items metadata. For our repository we like the option to attach such a license, but there is only one useful choice which is CC0 license. We dont need the interface for choosing the license. If only one of our depositors chooses not to attach CC0 for metadata, our harvestors would stop to integrate our content in their platforms, search interfaces and so on. It should be possible to make CC licensing a required step. As for the time being, we chose to just ignore the true nature of the CC license step in DSpace and act as if CC0 were applied globally to all metadata. I guess this is the way that developers of DSpace had in mind when they built the feature, but I am also sure, that it does not depict the actual legal situation. As of now, we have not raised this issue within the DSpace community because it is not simple to discuss. I embrace the chance exposed by this question to give a non-technical overview from the perspective of an operator of a repository. I guess it is perfectly suitable to discuss this on dspace-general and not on dspace-tech, because actual implementation of changes is a completely different pair of boots from understanding the requirements first of all. I hope that the discussion will go on. Bye, Christian Am 03.09.2014 um 20:06 schrieb Mark Diggory <[email protected]>: > Hello Ann, > > Its not currently possible to associate the CC license with individual > Bitstream. It generally applies to the Item as a whole. If you are reaching > the point where the Bitstreams have different availability and reuse > limitations, the current strategy I would recommend is to separate them into > individual Items and assign CC and usage rights in the Item metadata. In > future versions of DSpace, Bitstreams may support additional metadata > attached to them, however this would also require the submission process to > be altered to allow attachment of CC licenses to individual bitstreams rather > than the item as a whole. So, at this time, without alteration of DSpace > itself, my recommendation would be separate the Bitstreams into individual > Items for each license. > > Best, > Mark > > > On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 7:02 AM, Ann Devenish <[email protected]> wrote: > Dear Colleagues" > > A user presents an interesting question: > > Attached to a single metadata record are a variety of files (data sets, > movies in a variety of formats, and text files) representing a single > project. The user has determined that no one Creative Commons license > is appropriate to all the files. > > Is it possible to apply multiple CC licenses on one record? > > Suggestions welcomed! > > thanks, > Ann > > -- > Ann Devenish > MBLWHOI Library > Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution - MS#8 > Woods Hole, MA 02543 > phone: 508-289-2865 > ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7995-9844 > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Slashdot TV. > Video for Nerds. Stuff that matters. > http://tv.slashdot.org/ > _______________________________________________ > Dspace-general mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dspace-general > > > > -- > > Mark Diggory > 2888 Loker Avenue East, Suite 315, Carlsbad, CA. 92010 > Esperantolaan 4, Heverlee 3001, Belgium > http://www.atmire.com > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ > Slashdot TV. > Video for Nerds. Stuff that matters. > http://tv.slashdot.org/_______________________________________________ > Dspace-general mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dspace-general ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Slashdot TV. Video for Nerds. Stuff that matters. http://tv.slashdot.org/ _______________________________________________ Dspace-general mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dspace-general
