Hi Paul,
Thank you for taking time out to respond on this and explain a bit. The
prospect of 80,000 different copyright statements at DPLA is quite a
thought!
Although my first reaction to rs.org was to feel quite threatened by
what appeared to be its slant, when I re-read through it more thoroughly
when writing to the list I did start to think that perhaps I was
reacting more to *presentation* rather than to content.
After all the page does present CC licenses as the first best choice.
But, as I said, it's easy to miss that because it is the restrictions
that get the big graphics and the emphasis. Perhaps this could be
addressed by adding a similar graphic quartered in four that showed the
logos of CC0, CC-BY, CC-SA, and CC-BY-SA, to counteract this perception
and underline that these too are first-class choices.
I can also understand an intention for rs.org to be descriptive of what
does exist, rather than normative of what should exist. But no text is
value free, and sometimes what is not said can communicate values
(perhaps not those that might be intended) as powerfully as a direct
statement.
I understand the purpose of rs.org to describe existing content. But if
it takes off, it will surely also be used as a reference point for
organisations entering into agreements regarding new content. If there
is a view that there are issues with some of the conditions, eg NC or
some of the InC conditions, that they should be deprecated, considered
less than satisfactory, or treated with considerable caution, then there
is a case for pointing to that in some small footnote, or at least for a
little distancing. Saying nothing is not necessarily neutral.
Sorry if I come over as excessively critical. I know and trust you guys
all to be on the side of the angels. But sometimes small tweaks to
presentation can make a powerful difference.
All best,
James.
On 21/11/2017 21:34, Paul Keller wrote:
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.
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