Intellectual Property Rights and Licensing

The digital era has been one of remixing and rehashing data, of socio-technical platforms and movements like Napster, Bit-torrent peer-to-peer sharing, digital piracy and digital rights management protocols to fight it all.  On some level, this has made us all aware of the issue of intellectual property rights, roughly defined as an individual or organisation’s right to control and profit from creations of the mind, such as inventions; literary and artistic works; designs; and symbols, names and images.  

In most cases the exclusive right to use and reuse creative work expires after a certain period of time, but it is not always clear where those rights lie for cultural heritage objects.  This can lead to quite varied practices, for instance in access rights to archival holdings, with some institutions viewing them as public property, and others charging users for the right to access or image materials.

Research infrastructures need to be active in managing and negotiating the access to cultural heritage content in environments that bring many sources together.  In many cases, they will themselves apply and request the use of a Creative Commons license, clearly allowing either unrestricted reuse or reuse with attribution to the original source.  As such, infrastructures are at the forefront of managing distributed content in an environment where the legal status may not be clear.  They also promote proper citation of resources, in particular digital resources; an aspect of research culture that is lagging behind the actual practice of using digital resources.