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.
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