DPLA Board of Directors Call, December 17, 2012
peter.suber's bookmarks 2012-12-28
Summary:
"The DPLA is committed to asserting no new rights—and will claim no rights—over the
metadata that it aggregates from its various data-providing partners. It has also pledged to
make all of this metadata freely available under a Creative Commons 0 license (public domain
dedication).
Board member Paul Courant expressed his strong interest in the topic. Courant described how
the metadata that the DPLA will be aggregating is essentially data, or, in other words, facts
about certain objects. Under US copyright law, one is not allowed to copyright facts, and
Courant expressed concern that, by instituting a CC0 metadata policy, the DPLA might be
suggesting that copyright does in fact apply to metadata. Toward that end, he asked the group
if there was a way to institute a metadata policy that doesn’t imply copyright in this way.
The Board agreed that the DPLA might want to pursue a strategy that doesn’t perceive
copyright in its metadata, and Palfrey and Courant agreed to move forward with spearheading
the mechanics of such a policy...."