CARARE - D2.4 Report and recommendations on IPR (Final)

Executive Summary

This deliverable forms a part of CARARE WP2 Preparing and enabling as described in the Description of Work (DoW): “A review of any IPR issues in the content to be harvested will be completed to inform work by the Europeana IPR cluster”.

The clear expression of rights in digital content is needed to enable citizens to access and re-use the material discovered through Europeana, and is an important requirement for CARARE. Much of the content identified by CARARE partners is made available to users under the terms of a licensing policy. Appropriate licensing policies create trust on the side of both producers and consumers; they define clear terms and conditions of use for the material, which is important even for freely accessible online content.

Among the main results of the CARARE survey the content providers reported that the objects held in 44 collections and the metadata for 24 collections were in the public domain.

The Creative Commons licence framework has been widely discussed in the context of the clarity with which it allows copyright holders to describe to users the conditions under which they may use content, 12 CARARE content providers were using such a licence, according to the results of the project"s survey. Individual content providers within the CARARE consortium have also developed their own licences to permit re-use of their data, for example the Archaeology Data Service Common Access agreement.

A series of workshops, with representatives, from the network were held to produce the new version of the Europeana Data Providers and Aggregator Agreements. These were organised by EuropeanaConnect WP4, the Europeana Licensing Framework. The workshops reviewed the limitations of the current Data Provider & Aggregator Agreements in the context of Linked Open Data, use of Wikipedia and the search engines as promoters of Europeana and the Content Provider & Aggregator sites.

A major sentiment arising from this work was that the majority felt that the non commercial clause needed to be removed in the interests of being able to publish metadata as Linked Open Data. An assessment of risks and rewards was made as a result of this work. The Europeana Council of Content Providers and Aggregators has also formed a legal working group which will deal with the legal obstacles involved in contributing to Europeana.

A draft version of a revised Data Provider and Aggregator Agreement was circulated to the Europeana network in December 2010, for comment and signature in 2011.

Other specific IPR issues for CARARE covered by this document include data re-use, geospatial data and IPR in 3D/VR models. It is recommended that CARARE adopts a risk management approach to ongoing IPR issues.