Showing posts with label europeana. Show all posts
Showing posts with label europeana. Show all posts

28 August 2009

Defending the Digitised Public Domain

The European Commission has published a review of the Europeana digital library (remember that?). There's one critically important section, which touches on the hot issue of digitising public domain content:

Much of the material accessible in digital format through Europeana is in the public domain; this means it is not or no longer covered by copyright and can in principle be accessed and used by all. This material is an important source of re-use by citizens and companies alike and a driver of creativity in the internet age. For this reason, the Commission has underlined the need to keep "public domain works accessible after a format shift. In other words, works in the public domain should stay there once digitised and be made accessible through the internet".

In practice this is not always the case. While some of the cultural institutions explicitly indicate that the material they bring into Europeana is in the public domain, others claim rights on the digitised copies and/or charge for downloads. A few institutions apply watermarks and, in one case, viewing the material in a reasonable size is subject to payment. The different practices reflect the wide range of approaches across the EU, which are sometimes dictated by increasing pressure on cultural institutions to raise direct income from the assets they hold. Requiring payment for digitised public domain works also reflects the fact that digitisation has a cost. At the same time it seriously limits the cultural and economic potential of the material.

From a legal point of view the question is whether digitisation in itself creates new rights. Normally this would not be the case. However, the level of originality needed for the creation of copyright is not harmonised at European level, so the answer to the question may differ from one Member State to another.8 It may also vary for different types of digitisation (for example the scanning of books is not the same as costly 3D rendering of objects).

The issue of principle is whether it is acceptable to lock up public domain material that has been digitised with public money by public institutions instead of turning it into a pervasive asset for the information society. The latter approach is in line with the Community policy on the re-use of public sector information, as well as the OECD Ministerial Recommendation on Enhanced Access and More Effective Use of Public Sector Information.9 This issue is essential for the functioning of Europeana, since in its conditions of use the site follows the policies of the contributing institutions.

Similar issues arise when public institutions grant exclusive arrangements to private firms for the digitisation and exploitation of their unique public domain assets in exchange for material advantages. Such arrangements risk locking up public domain content, but in some cases they may be the only way to finance digitisation. This dilemma was expressed by the High Level Group on Digital Libraries in its report on public private partnerships for digitisation. The Group recommended that "public domain content in the analogue world should remain in the public domain in the digital environment. If restrictions to users’ access and use are necessary in order to make the digital content available at all, these restrictions should only apply for a time-limited period."

This is a crucially important issue. At the moment, some publishers are trying to create a new copyright in public domain materials just because they have been digitised. This is not only absurd, but threatens to nullify much of the huge potential of turning analogue knowledge into digital form. The European Commission deserves praise for highlighting this danger: now it needs to do something about it by passing legislation that settles the issue once and for all. (Via At last ... the 1709 Copyright Blog.)

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20 November 2008

Welcome to Europeana

Europeana: think culture

Europeana.eu is about ideas and inspiration. It links you to 2 million digital items.

* Images - paintings, drawings, maps, photos and pictures of museum objects
* Texts - books, newspapers, letters, diaries and archival papers
* Sounds - music and spoken word from cylinders, tapes, discs and radio broadcasts
* Videos - films, newsreels and TV broadcasts

Some of these are world famous, others are hidden treasures from Europe's

* museums and galleries
* archives
* libraries
* audio-visual collections

Here is a list of the organisations that our content comes from. They include the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the British Library in London and the Louvre in Paris.

You can use My Europeana to save searches or bookmark things. You can highlight stuff and add it to your own folders.

This website is a prototype. Europeana Version 1.0 is being developed and will launch in 2010 with links to over 6 million digital objects.

Europeana.eu is funded by the European Commission and the member states.

Well, that all sounds pretty euro-groovy. But what, I wonder can you do with it?

To find out, I went to the most important page on the site, the terms and conditions; which said:

Copyright

Europeana portal will offer:

* Editorial parts using material for which copyright issues and rights to reuse is cleared
* Content: parts of bibliographic description and low resolution images given to us by the contributing EuropeanaNet Thematic Network partners to build the Europeana common access point to their own web site

The whole Europeana index and website is an online database owned by the European Digital Library Foundation.

For the purpose of this Europeana prototype (which is just a pilot demo) there is no formal agreement signed defining precisely where and how the rights are expressed in the metadata that Europeana are aggregated. Some metadata contain the expressed rights and in other cases the user is given more information on the provider's own web site when clicking to see, read, listen to or watch the object. So Europeana for the purposes of this prototype will adopt the following Copyright statement from the MLA Discovery portal:

All third-party material presented within this website are subject to individual Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) conditions and licences. Providing details of such IPR and licensing is the responsibility of third-party sources and should be either presented within this website or available from the originating sources of the third party material

The lack of written agreement with each provider, other than the Thematic Network Agreement signed by each of the contributing partners, means that for this prototype a detailed Terms and Conditions of Use statement is not possible.

The European Digital Library Foundation and its content contributors hold the copyright for all material and all content in this site, including site layout, design, images, programs, text and other information (collectively, the "Content") held in Europeana.eu. No material may be resold or published elsewhere without the European Digital Library Foundations written consent, unless authorised by a licence with the European Digital Library Foundations or to the extent required by the applicable law.

In other words, a complete and utter dog's breakfast. Not that this is the fault of those behind Europeana: it's a reflection of the unworkable mess that copyright has become. Time to simplify it:

copyright lasts for a maximum of 14 years

- und damit basta.

16 February 2008

Is Europeana Too Flash?

I've written before about the nascent European Digital Library:

Consistent with the i2010 digital library initiative, this thematic network will build consensus to create the European Digital Library. It will find solutions to the interoperability of the cultural content held by European museums, archives, audio-visual archives and libraries in the context of The European Digital Library.

Now we have a chance to try it out - at least as a demo. It's cross-linking is impressively rich, but I do worry that we're going to end up with something too flashy - or, rather, too Flashy, with lots of invisible code that makes deep linking impossible. We shall see - or maybe not....