By providing clear, unambiguous and accessible licences, data providers can communicate the rights, restrictions and obligations associated with reuse. This promotes responsible and lawful use within the defined conditions. In the field of cultural data, metadata can often be licensed more openly than the digital representations of specific cultural assets.
As automated search and evaluation increasingly incorporates licensing aspects, the clarity of the licence status becomes all the more important. The conditions under which the data can be used must be unambiguous for both machines and humans.
To enable the broadest possible reuse of data and metadata, it should be clear who holds the rights to the respective data and which license applies.
Wherever possible, open licensing models such as Creative Commons should be used. If this is not feasible, the machine-readable rights statements from Rightsstatements.org can also be used. These were specifically developed for cultural heritage institutions and platform operators, and they also include machine-readable rights statements for objects under copyright protection or with unclear copyright status.
Keep in mind that the 2021 reform of German copyright law offers libraries, archives, and museums new legal opportunities to make their materials more accessible. More information can be found in the guide Urheberrechtsreform 2021 – Neue Chancen für das kulturelle Erbe by Paul Klimpel.
Ensure that before publishing your research data, you know who holds the rights to the data and metadata, and which legal reuse conditions apply. Copyright, personal rights, performance protection rights, and archival rights may need to be considered, as they are relevant to different types of data in various ways.
In digital humanities projects, it is common to work with third-party data (e.g. text, image files). Therefore, you should include rights clearance into the planning of your project from the very beginning. Allocate sufficient resources to identify the rights holders and obtain permissions for use. Rights clearance may be required at various levels, such as the artist’s copyright and the owner's rights for the work depicted, copyright for the image itself, for third-party texts used, and with regard to both the data and metadata.
Ensure that the license or rights statement is associated with an appropriate URI in the data and metadata, making it machine-readable.
Avoid publishing data without license information, even if you believe reuse would not be problematic. Due to the legal risks and the additional efforts required for determining reuse conditions by the subsequent user, the use of data without a license is often avoided. Even if certain types of use must be restricted, these should be clearly specified rather than simply stating ‘All rights reserved’.
Clearly communicate under which license the data and metadata are provided, and under what conditions they may be reused. Make this information available in a machine-readable format. To improve interoperability, aim to align your licenses with widely adopted frameworks such as Creative Commons. Enable the specification of the rights holder, including their PID. Implement effective rights management to control the use of the data, ensuring it is only used within the limits set by the respective rights holders. Users may be required to accept and confirm the reuse terms online before accessing the dataset.
Böker, E.: Rechtssichere Nachnutzung von Forschungsdaten(-banken), Forschungsdaten.info, 2023/05/12
iRights.info – Urheberrecht und kreatives Schaffen in der digitalen Welt
Muuß-Merholz, Jöran: Die CC-Lizenzen im Überblick – Welche Lizenz für welche Zwecke?, wb-web, 2021