rightsstatements.org

Institutional websites and aggregation initiatives like Europeana and DPLA seek to facilitate access and re-use of vast amounts of digitized cultural material online. Metadata about digitized content has long been identified as a key asset to facilitate these ends, and these initiatives have created metadata frameworks that enhance interoperability across information spaces and systems. Expressing the conditions for re-use that derive from intellectual property rights remains an issue, however. Published (meta)datasets still often indicate copyrights and other access conditions using ad-hoc descriptions that specific to sectors, languages and national contexts. Creative Commons is a great leap forward, as it provides a standardized set of licenses and public domain marks that can be used to label open digital heritage resources in an interoperable way. Its focus on full openness, however, means that it cannot be used for a significant part of cultural collections published online. Recently, W3C has published the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) for representing policies that combine permissions and duties.