Hi James, Thanks for your observations on rightsstatements.org Since I happen to be a lurker on this list (via digest) and since you name-check me in your observations let me try to answer some of the question that you have raised. This is not necessarily a response on behalf of rightsstatements.org but I believe hat the following is broadly in line with how others who are involved with the project look at these issues.
While I can understand your initial reaction to the suite of rights statements that is offered by rs.org I think you are misunderstanding the purpose of the site. The purpose of rs.org is certainly not to to "to march people *away* from the maximum openness, access, and impact.” Instead rightsstatements.org was conceived out of a need for standardised, well-structured machine readable rights information that can be used with digital objects that cannot be made available under an open license or marked as being in the public domain. For most cultural heritage institutions (and aggregators) such objects make up the majority of the digital objects on their platforms. This concerns works that are in copyright but which can be made available online by the organisations who have them in their collections. This can be because the institutions rely on fair use or on other exceptions to copyright, or because they have obtained licenses from the rights holders or CMOs for the sole purpose of making these works available online. While we have a set of standardised machine readable tools to mark up works that can be made avail under open terms (the Creative Commons licenses and PD tools), prior to rights statements.org there were no standardised machine readable tools that could serve to describe the copyright status of works that cannot be openly shared. This meant that Europeana relied on its own set of (rather crummy) rights statements (see here for an overview: https://github.com/Kennisland/EuropeanaLicensingFramework/tree/master/statements or here for an actual example: https://www.europeana.eu/portal/en/rights/rr-r.html). The DPLA at that time did not use standardised rights statements at all, which resulted in them having in excess of 80.000 different copyright statements in in their collection. The idea behind rights statements.org is to provide standardised rights statements to express the copyright and reuse sates of works that cannot be made available under one of the CC licenses and tools. This is not to promote the unfree status of such objects but to make it easier for users to understand the rights status of such digital objects and to enable platforms to allow users to filter their collections based on standardised rights statuses. While it is clear that labelling works with a rs.org statement does not contribute to the commons it does contribute to the ability of users to understand what parts of the vast cultural heritage collections available online they can freely re-use and which part they cannot (note that we have taken great care to make it absolutely clear in the statements that works that are in copyright can still be used under exceptions to copyright). In short the purpose is not to march people away from openness but to enable institutions who have collection with varying rights statuses to clearly indicate which parts of them are open and which are not. Hope this helps you understand the rationale behind making these statements available. Now with regards to your observations about individual statements. It is true that some of our statements are more problematic than others. This concerns the three NoCopyright statements that carry additional restrictions. All of these have been modelled on existing restrictions that platforms like Europeana and DPLA are already dealing with. We do not promote them but given that we have digital objects with such complicated rights statements in our collections and given that we rely on standardised statements there was a need to model these rights statements. John has rightly pointed out that a lot of the material in Europeana comes from digitisation partnerships where the parties have agreed to limit the re-use of the resulting digital objects for whatever reasons. Personally I think such arrangements are morally wrong, but I still think we need to allow our partners who have entered in them to express the conditions they have agreed on in a standardised way. If you take a look at https://pro.europeana.eu/page/available-rights-statements you will also discover that Europeana actually employs a set of checks before such restrictive statements can be used and that we do not allow the use of all rs.org statements (for example we have decided against allowing the use of the NoC-CR statement, or the InC-NC statement). We will also carefully monitor the use of the InC-EDU and the NoC-OKLR statements with an eye on deciding if we continue to support them in the future. On a final note, we are still working out how to best run rightsstatements.org but if people here are genuinely interested in contributing to the project we are open to participation on various levels. Have a look at http://rightsstatements.org/en/get_involved.html to learn more. Paul p.s the order of the licenses on http://rightsstatements.org/page/1.0/?language=en. Is generated via a script that pulls that information from a master file that contains all the statements. We are not intentionally displaying the contractual restrictions statement first but should probably look if we can change the order here. > I was wondering, have people on this list had any contact with, or have any > thoughts about rightsstatements.org (http://rightsstatements.org) ? > > I was in a twitter chat earlier with a digital librarian at University > College Dublin (re whether or not a copyright they were asserting for > Ordnance Survey Ireland re digitisation of some old maps had any basis in > reality), and, in passing, she proudly mentioned that they were going to > start adding rightsstatements.org standard descriptions of copyright status > to all content. > > I had a look at the site, and my first take was it must have been an > initiative from some of the major publishers, so loaded did it seem to be > towards promoting different options for *preventing* people doing things with > one's content. > > I was quite surprised to find that actually it seems to be a 100% GLAM > initiative, initiated by DPLA and Europeana, with strong input from Creative > Commons, and Kennisland's Paul Keller as one of the chairs. (And I see that > our own Alex Stinson and Federico Leva even contributed some thoughts in the > development phase) > > Yet to me (I don't know if others agree), the lead document at > http://rightsstatements.org/page/1.0/?language=en seems rather hostile to the > widest access, openness, and re-use. > > Yes, Creative Commons licences /are/ in fact mentioned as the 1st-best option > in the body text, if one reads closely. But I have to admit I missed that > completely the first time I skimmed the page -- because it is only the > restrictions that get the big graphics and the emphasis. > > My worry would be that if organisations like UCD make it a policy to mark > their material up with a rightsstatements.org indicator wherever possible, > this will (subtly or not-so-subtly) lead them away from PD or CC0 choices; or > away from "attribution" requirements (which are not on the page) towards > "non-commercial" restrictions (which are). > > (Any NC statement of course also opens up a huge can of worms as to just what > activities and by whom are or are not "non-commercial" -- something the page > does not flag up, and which the site offers no clarification about, as to > what might or might not be the intended meaning). > > I am also quite concerned about the apparent endorsement given to the > "contractual restrictions" option, and indeed its prominence on the page -- > placed as the first option for non-copyright material, almost as if to > encourage institutions to see this as the appropriate default status. > > "Contractual restrictions" seems a particularly nasty way to try to fence in > the public domain. It's also questionable in its effectiveness. The > long-term folk wisdom on Commons has been that if a museum has a sign up > saying "no photography" or "personal photography only", but somebody takes a > photograph and someone uploads it to Commons, that any claim would stop (at > most) with the photographer -- Commons has no contract with the museum, so is > not a party to any restrictions. That may be a slightly rose-tinted and > self-serving view, but it seems a little odd to see this option so blandly > endorsed, and indeed promoted, without any qualification. > > It seems odd, given who they are, that the people behind rightsstatements.org > would produce a site that seems calculated to march people *away* from the > maximum openness, access, and impact. > > Yet - I don't know if the list would agree - but to me that seems to be > exactly what the current presentation does, leading people away from sharing > and freedom, and instead normalising closure and restriction, even for PD > materials. > > I'd like to know whether the list agrees with me on this; or whether I'm > being over-sensitive and perhaps just encountered the site in the wrong frame > of mind. But, since between us I think we have a lot of contacts with the > people involved with this project, if others see something in these concerns, > perhaps it might be worth a quiet word to see if the presentation could > perhaps be re-balanced a bit, to more even-handedly present more open options? > > -- James. > > PS. Going back to the point of my initial discussion with UCD, if copyrights > /are/ being asserted on apparently well-published archival material, it seems > to me that it would be useful if the site encouraged as standard best > practice a statement of /why/ it was asserted that there was copyright in the > material -- eg whether there had genuinely been a copyrightable expression of > creativity or judgment involved. This would lend such claims extra weight, in > a world where there is so much copyfraud around that such assertions > otherwise might get casually dismissed. _______________________________________________ Publicpolicy mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/publicpolicy
