Getting it Right on Rights: Simplifying, Harmonizing, and Maximizing the Openness of Rights in Digital Libraries around the World

Large-scale collections like the Digital Public Library of America, Europeana, Trove, and DigitalNZ have enriched the free web by making openly available tens of millions of items from libraries, archives, museums, and cultural heritage sites from their respective countries or continents. This burgeoning public commons is weakened, however, by a lack of common agreement over rights statements on these items, inconsistent international copyright law, and risk aversion among many nonprofit institutions. We will bring together these international projects to harmonize and evangelize a simpler rights structure, one that includes ways for works of all types, including materials with unclear or no known rights, to be made available to the public.

Read the full proposal at the Knight News Challenge site, and weigh in with your support and comments!

All written content on this blog is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. All images found on this blog are available under the specific license(s) attributed to them, unless otherwise noted.