Digital Public Library of America » Blog Archive » Digital Public Library of America wins Knight News Challenge award, receives $300,000 to develop simplified rights structure for digital materials alongside international partners

"The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) announced today that it has received $300,000 from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation as part of its Knight News Challenge, an open contest seeking ideas that strengthen the Internet for free expression and innovation. Selected from more than 650 applicants, DPLA’s 'Getting it Right on Rights' project will create a simplified and more coherent rights structure for digital items, making access to, and use of, items found in large-scale digital collections like DPLA easier and more straightforward for users ... The project will involve international meetings, led by DPLA and Europeana, the pan-European digital library, involving domain experts who have a deep understanding of both the legal and content sides of this burgeoning field, including library and museum leaders, intellectual property lawyers, copyright officers, policy advisors, metadata specialists, and web technologists. DPLA will then work with these partners to set up a neutral namespace with an agreed-upon set of rights designations that will serve as complement to the similarly recognized Creative Commons designations. The goal is to make these designations an internationally recognized standard, which will encourage widespread adoption. Finally, DPLA and its project partners will produce a best practices guide that institutions around the world can use to safely make more content available to the public.  The grant is premised on the notion that freely accessible collections of content from libraries, museums, archives and other sources lack consistency on usage rights and are further weakened by inconsistent copyright law and aversion to risk by nonprofit institutions. While the public commons from the past several millennia has never been more available online, the absence of a common agreement over rights statements has made use of these items unclear.“Getting it Right on Rights” will bring together these important collections to harmonize and evangelize a simpler rights structure, one that includes ways for works of all types, including works with unclear or no known rights, to be put online and made available to the public. The project will enhance the open web by significantly expanding the content available, and permissively reusable, in our critical digital public space ..."