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Many things called “rights” – at CDL, we decided to concentrate on Copyright; felt that in today’s environment and with current law, recording of data to support copyright analysis was key. Also, other working taking place around license metadata.
“Rights” –Wesley N. Hohfeld (1919)  Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial  Reasoning
1.Duty (P duty Q not X)
2.Negative duty as well as positive requirement (rights to active assistance as well as negative freedom
3.Ability of power (power of individual to alter existing legal arrangements
4.An immunity from legal change (not only rihgt as power but also lack of power)
Ronald Dworkin—(1984) Rights as Trumps
Why is copyright metadata “suddenly” needed? Because change in copyright law to base duration on the life of the author rather than counting from the date of copyright, means that the item itself does not contain the data you need to figure out if it is under copyright. As originally enacted, the 1976 law prescribed that all visually perceptible published copies of a work, or published phonorecords of a sound recording, should bear a proper copyright notice. This applies to such works published before March 1, 1989. After March 1, 1989, notice of copyright on these works is optional. Adding the notice, however, is strongly encouraged and, if litigation involving the copyright occurs, certain advantages exist for publishing a work with notice. Prior to March 1, 1989, the requirement for the notice applied equally whether the work was published in the United States or elsewhere by authority of the copyright owner. Compliance with the statutory notice requirements was the responsibility of the copyright owner. Unauthorized publication without the copyright notice, or with a defective notice, does not affect the validity of the copyright in the work.
This change in copyright law, plus the extension of the term, may have been terrible mistakes, but we are stuck with it.
In the digital environment, ever act of access or viewing is a “copyright event” (terminology of Michael Carroll of Creative Commons), so copyright has become even more important than ever.
Our main purpose is to provide an important service to the user who wishes to make use of an item obtained from the library.
We often see notices along with digital works that say something like this:
If the item is covered by copyright law and not a license , well, it’s covered by copyright law. And the library is often making restrictions or giving permissions that it has absolutely no right to make or give. In part, this is done to help the user; to let the user know what is and isn’t allowed. But this practice is somewhat dubious, and the information given to users may be incorrect.
In addition, no single statement can be true for all uses and all users.
So we began to wonder: what are the data elements that define copyright status? And how can the owning institution help this poor user?
We looked at the excellent chart by Peter Hirtle that helps people, in an almost algorithmic manner, determine the copyright status of an item that they have in hand. From this, we extrapolated key data elements that would help someone make this assessment. Not in all of the detail that Peter includes, but most of it.
Point out:
  “Life of author” i.e. when author died
  “Published vs unpublished works”
  “with and without copyright notice”
Next, we had a look at the excellent work of Mary Minow, who walks us through a similar situation of trying to learn what is the copyright status of a work that we wish to digitize.
Point out:
  “published vs unpublished”
  “with and without copyright notice”
  “foreign works”
We also looked at existing metadata schemes to see what they provided for copyright metadata. Each had some elements, but no one scheme has all of the data elements.
We decided that the key data elements would be: who is/are the creator(s), who is the rights holder; if the item is published, when and where was it published; if the item is not published, when and where was it created? And finally we wanted to provided information on what services are available to the user.
Our schema is very simple, and has these elements:
For the publisher and creation info...
User service value – is it worth going back to the archive to obtain more information? The “contact archive” method is quite costly to users, and often does not result in more information. Need to know if archive has provided all that they have.
We haven’t determined how best to represent this. It may be covered adequately by the descriptive rules, but we all agree it’s important to know.