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/state…
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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