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.