SAA 2017: Session 504 The Rights Stuff: Encouraging Appropriate Reuse with Standardized Rights Statements

In advance of the 2017 Annual Meeting, we invited SNAP members to contribute summaries of panels, section meetings, forums, and pop-up sessions. Summaries represent the opinions of their individual authors; they are not necessarily endorsed by SNAP, members of the SNAP Steering Committee, or SAA.

Guest Author: Michael Barera, Archivist, Texas A&M University-Commerce

The panel for this section consisted of Laura Capell (Head of Digital Production & Electronic Records Archivist, University of Miami), MJ Han (Metadata Librarian, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Brandy Karl (Copyright Officer, Penn State University Libraries), Sheila McAlister (Director, Digital Library of Georgia), and Kelcy Shepherd (DPLA Network Manager, Digital Public Library of America).

Kelcy (who served as the moderator) began the session by observing that there are 26,000 unique rights statements in a sample of 1.3 million records in the Digital Public Library of American (DPLA). They argue that this illustrates the need for standardized rights statements. However, according to Kelcy, “having to figure [it] out can be a real challenge…there were more words in the rights field than any other field in the metadata,” including the description field. Unfortunately, while the DPLA has a lot of text in its rights fields, the information it contains is not always clear.

Kelcy then introduced the website RightsStatements.org, noting that its idea is to “provide accurate rights statements in ways that users can understand.” It is a partnership between the DPLA and European Union-wide Europeana project and is funded by the Knight Foundation. Recently, archives in Canada and India have also joined the project. Kelcy also observed that in a few years, the DPLA will start requiring standardized rights statements.

Delving into the details, Kelcy outlined the three categories of rights statements that are addressed by RightsStatements.org: in copyright (with specific rights statements such as such as “in copyright,” “EU orphan works,” and “unknown rightsholder”), no copyright (such as “contractual restriction,” “non-commercial use only,” “other legal restrictions,” and “no copyright in the United States”), and unclear (including “no known copyright”).

Kelcy elaborated by noting that “for every statement, there is a standard logo for the statement that users will start to recognize [and] a brief statement of what [the standard] means,” as well as a uniform resource identifier (URI) that is machine-readable and thus will enable searching for freely usable content. She also noted that RightsStatements.org has principles for its statements: they should all be simple, flexible, descriptive, accurate, and transparent. She then proceeded to display “before” and “after” screenshots of rights statements enhanced by the standardized RightsStatements.org statements, noting in particular how prominent the rights statement logo is in the “after” case. She also noted the “can I use it?” feature on a DPLA webpage mockup. Additionally, the fact that the rights statements are machine readable will allow searching for and filtering materials by rights statements.

Kelcy then concluded the presentation portion of the session by listing a variety of further resources, including RightsStatements.org, the “SAA Guide to Implementing Rights Statements from RightsStatements.org,” the University of Miami’s “Assigning Rights Statements to Legacy Digital Collections” document, Washington University’s “Turning Wrongs into Rights” document, the DPLA’s Rights Implementation Webinar, and Peter Hirtle’s Copyright Term in the United States.

Kelcy then transitioned to the panel portion of the session.

Question: Why use standardized rights statements? What are the benefits?

• MJ: The library and/or archives benefits the most.
• Brandy: “Most of all, the user benefits,” as it makes it easier for them to use the material. Rights statements are often confusing or even plain wrong, for example in the case of “bad information” about rights regarding the song “Happy Birthday to You” before it was determined to be in the public domain a couple of years ago.
• Laura: To help users as well as the archive. 90% of materials at the University of Miami had no rights information or “unhelpful” rights information.

Question: How are you implementing standardized rights statements?

• MJ: 60% of rights statements at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) were actually not rights statements, so these terms were moved out of the rights statements field and into the correct fields, such as description. Also, collection owners often wanted a specific rights statement on top of the standardized rights statements, which necessitated the implementation of a second metadata field.
• Brandy: Metadata librarians at Penn State began implementing standardized rights statements before the RightsStatements.org guidelines were finalized. This process consisted of mapping existing rights statements, “making sure that rights statements are right [correct],” preserving copyright renewal information for the benefit of users (even though this information is not captured in the standardized rights statements), conducting risk assessments (which she observed are important to conduct before putting online materials that are not in the public domain and for which Penn State does not hold the rights), “actually going in and assigning the rights” (which “is a lot of spreadsheet work”), and finally, in many cases, actually changing the rights statements.
• Laura: At Miami, they also used spreadsheets (as they found they could not automate the process) and did item-level assessments using a decision matrix (which accounted for Cuban copyright law in addition to its American counterpart because a large number of their materials were created in Cuba). She noted that “the largest challenge that we faced was the limitations of our existing metadata,” and that they also conducted a risk assessment.
• Sheila: At the Digital Library of Georgia, “we’re a little different because we’re an aggregator: this is not our stuff.” She noted that they advocated to their partners, with whom they also conducted in-person training sessions with them (“we were very strategic with who we trained,” as they focused on “champions” who would take up the banner for the project). Furthermore, they worked with their largest partners (such as Georgia State University) to map their rights statements to RightsStatements.org, looked at their titles, did some scripting works based on dates, and conducted a collection-by-collection analysis. Going forward, they plan to have more training sessions, while Sheila also noted that they are currently creating a new public interface, which should allow them to do more “metadata massaging.”

Question: What are some specific issues and complexities you’ve run into?

• Sheila: For the Digital Library of Georgia, challenges have included educating partners, working with municipal archives (which have public records that they sometimes assume are in the public domain), and state documents (which are copyright-protected in Georgia).
• Brandy: At Penn State, challenges have included working with the State Hub on “creating training for other partners in the hub” and a “phone hotline” (as she explained, “I always encourage peer knowledge, working with someone else”), the fact that consistency is difficult (they recommend creating a matrix, like Miami did), and the difference between published and unpublished works (they recommend “going out and taking the training,” especially webinars). Brandy also observed an important point to consider: “What is your institution’s willingness to take on risk?…We’re not always the ones who can make those decisions.” (Note that this is a matter for your institution’s administration and/or legal counsel.)

Question: What additional complications do archival collections present in determining accurate rights statements?

• Laura: Deeds of gift are a major additional complication. She observed that newer deeds of gift are more likely to mention copyright than older ones, and that they “can be really helpful” in determining if and when donors transferred copyright to the institution. Nonetheless, there are still pitfalls, such as the question of if the donor had the ability to transfer rights to the repository in the first place. She recommended that “if you’re current deeds of gift don’t mention copyright, you should update them,” as copyright is most easily handled at this stage.
• Sheila: There are often different copyrights in a single folder, which causes a real problem for folder-level description. At the Digital Library of Georgia, they “use the most restrictive statement” for folders in these cases, and then add extra rights statements about other, less restrictive or public domain rights statements for items in the folder, as applicable. She lamented that this is not ideal, however.
• MJ: Specific rights statements can always be added in addition to standardized statements.
• Brandy: “One of the things I recommend is a site-wide copyright statement.” She also implored attendees to make sure users know they are responsible for making their own copyright-related decisions regarding materials, and give them an avenue to improve or correct rights statements on the website. Additionally, at Penn State, they would probably note that orphan works are (assumed to be) in copyright. The big question to ask: “What is your risk profile for putting things online?” Remember that many institutions are very conservative in this respect, as they only put public domain (and perhaps also orphan works) online.

The session then concluded by opening up the panel to questions from the audience:

• What is the worst thing that can happen if you put the wrong rights statements on online materials?
  • Brandy: The user could use the item without doing their due diligence and end up being sued for copyright infringement. She noted, however, that “the likelihood of that happening is really small…If you’re not sure, use one of the statements that expresses your uncertainty.” She also highlighted that the use of a site-wide disclaimer is also highly recommended.
  • Sheila: There is a disclaimer regarding this built into the standardized rights statements themselves.

• How do you handle culturally sensitive indigenous materials?
  • Kelcy: There are “traditional knowledge” labels that do a better job of addressing this than Western ideas of copyright. She also noted that materials may be out of copyright but have “other legal restrictions” that apply to them, which can be related to indigenous cultural practices and expectations.

• What about materials that are in copyright but are published under a Creative Commons license?
  • Sheila: DPLA wants partner institutions to either use the standard rights statements or a Creative Commons (CC) license. As she observed, “the challenge for us is that most of our partners don’t understand the difference between the rights statements and a Creative Commons license.” Therefore, they need to double check these materials. She also noted that they ask small local newspapers to license their materials with CC licenses.
  • Brandy: “You need to make sure your institution has the rights…You can actually negotiate with your donors, if they have the rights, to put a CC license on their materials.” Penn State prefers to obtain the copyright to materials in their digital collections, but if they cannot do so, the next best option is having the material in question released under a CC license.

• What about items that may have more than one copyright attached to them (cases of “layered rights”), such as audio or video?
  • MJ: At UIUC, there was a case involving a book written by two people, and only one author provided permission to license it to the archives. Then, the other author complained about it being made available online under those terms, and the university wound up taking it down.
  • Brandy: She noted that a joint author “can authorize a license, as long as it is non-exclusive.” She also recommended considering if the rights are too messy, and remembering that using the most restrictive rights statement in cases involving layered rights is typically the best (and certainly the safest) approach. Providing partial access, or access to part of the material (“not the whole thing”), can be a possibility, as well.
  • Laura: Miami used two separate rights fields: they explained the nuances in the local rights field while then using multiple rights statements from RightsStatements.org in the standardized rights field. (Some of the other panelists note that this practice is actually technically impossible at their repositories and on their websites).