Rightsstatements.org White Paper: Recommendations for Standardized International Rights Statements

"Europeana, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), and many other libraries, archives 1 2 and other cultural heritage institutions believe that everyone should be able to engage with their cultural heritage online. We can help achieve this by giving cultural heritage institutions simple and standardized terms to summarize the copyright status of Works in their collection and how they may be used. These simple and standardized terms we call “Rights Statements.” Providing this information is essential for those who wish to actively engage with the Works they find online. Can they use it in a school report? Print it on a t­shirt? Integrate it into a commercial app? Currently, there is no global approach to rights statements that works for a broad set of institutions, leading to a confusing proliferation of terms. Simplifying the use and application of Rights Statements benefits both contributing organizations, which share their valuable collections online through aggregators such as Europeana and the DPLA, and the people who engage with those collections. Thus, we outline minimum, baseline standards for organizations contributing to the DPLA, Europeana and any other digital aggregator that adopts the rightsstatements.org standard. Rightsstatements.org establishes the vocabulary that every organization can use to talk to their audiences about copyright and related rights in a meaningful way. It provides the technical and governance infrastructure to support their development and adoption, and ensure their on­going relevance. In this paper, the product of a joint DPLA–Europeana Rights Statements Working Group, we recommend a series of Rights Statements that are simple, flexible and descriptive. We propose ten Rights Statements that the DPLA and Europeana partners can implement to communicate to users the copyright and related restrictions on use of Items in their collections. We propose to host these statements at rightsstatements.org, allowing each Item to which they are applied to be linked to the definitive explanation of its terms...."