| Discussion |
- I guess "holder" and "owner" are synonyms. I believe it is possible for the copyright owner to grant to a second party exclusive and perpetual right to license to third parties some particular right entailed by the copyright without transferring ownership of the copyright itself. In other words, the copyright owner might not be the agent with ability to grant some kind of permission or other. If this is an important point, we should ask an IP attorney. Possibly the issue is even country-dependent. --BobMorris 18:58, 7 February 2009 (CET)
- Bob, you are correct in that the owner can transfer some rights perpetually to other people. So rights holder and owner are not synonyms."AnnetteOlson 00:48, 4 February 2010 (CET)
- I believe we may need a "Licensor" and a "Media Supplier" agent. The term plus:licensor is defined as "a person or company that should be contacted to obtain a licence for using the item or who has licensed the item." The term Iptc4xmpExt: ImageSupplier
is defined as "Identifies the most recent supplier of the item, who is not necessarily its owner or creator." -- GregorHagedorn 22:27, 3 March 2009 (CET)
- I think "most recent supplier" (of the media) is a very difficult thing to pin down in a digital environment. Most recent supplier to who?
- I would go with plus:CopyrightOwnerName.--BobMorris 02:49, 4 March 2009 (CET)
- We have a separate field called Responsible Party (with additional fields with contact info), and I think it is very useful. The Media Supplier is really the Source/Contributing Partner of the resource, which I think has been defined elsewhere under Attribution info?....AnnetteOlson 00:48, 4 February 2010 (CET)
- Is not DC "rightsHolder" what we are talking about here? --Steve Baskauf 13:18, 28 April 2009 (CEST)
- No. dcterms:rightsHolder [2] is broader than the copyright owner. There can only be one copyright owner, but many individuals or organizations may hold other rights than the copyright, e.g. under license, or may hold limited copyrights, e.g. in a particular country. As a separate issue, dcterms:rightsHolder [2] is a complex object--its range is dcterms:Agent [2], and I am not sure at the moment whether such a thing can have a simple representation as a string. --BobMorris 06:55, 1 May 2009 (CEST)
- It seems to me that here (as well as elsewhere in this schema) we are getting so carried away with thinking of every possible contingency that we are in danger of missing what seems to me to be the main point of the whole effort: to come up with core elements to represent commonly needed metadata fields. A potential user of a media item is going to want to know who made the resource and should be acknowledged (the creator) and who controls the use of the resource and should be contacted for permission to use it (the rightsHolder). It seems to me that if we specify elements for convoluted terms beyond that, we are in danger of contributors populating those other elements and not populating the core ones that users really care about (i.e. the two I mentioned).
--Steve Baskauf 13:18, 28 April 2009 (CEST)
- There are only six required elements as discussed in the non normative document. In addition, we distinguish a "core" layer and an "extended" layer, which should help people decide how much of the optional items they want to implement either at the producer or the consumer side. I hope there is robust discussion about whether specific elements have such a small constituency that they should be moved out of the "core". When viewed from the classical GBIF use case—documentation of taxon occurrence—it is pretty easy to feel that some items are of little interest. However, MRTG identified a number of other use cases for multimedia that have been presented to the GBIF Science Committee as worthy of multimedia support. These include in taxonomic identification tools tools, documentation of species behavior, interactions, habitat, and so on. (In fact, I would say that the "and so on" includes at least the InfoItem subclasses of the GBIF Species Profile Model, SPM ). Finally, the items are divided into various conceptual categories, some of which might be of no concern at all to a given provider. For example, a collection of illustrations of ant morphology might have almost nothing to do with the metadata that document an observation of a collection event, e.g. georeferences. --BobMorris 06:55, 1 May 2009 (CEST)
- I think Steve's comment is very relevant: Yes, the important question will be "who should be contacted for permission to use it". However, is this the rightsHolder? Currently we express the copyright holder/owner - this agent will generally be able to give permission - and we inform about existing public licenses (such as Creative Commons) in License Statement/xmpRights:UsageTerms[1]. Steve, does it occur reasonable often that a non-copyright rights holder (i.e. a licensee) has the right to re-license? If so we probably need to add this. So our goals are the same, we just have a different (and maybe wrong) analysis at the moment of what is core and what is a complication. We analyse that dcterms:rightsHolder [2] is relevant primarily if you want to police copyright violations, expecting a complete list of a licenses ever given in there. --GregorHagedorn 07:48, 4 May 2009 (CEST)
- I am going to preface this by saying that I am not an expert on intellectual property law and also that my experience is only with U.S. copyright issues. I am also assuming that in referring to DC "rights" that we are talking about copyright - I can't think of other relevant rights. Based on my understanding and experience in licensing images, it would be relatively uncommon for any copyright holder to assign those rights to someone else. I think it is relatively rare for (at least free-lance) photographers to grant an exclusive license to any user. The normal text of licensing agreements from textbook publishers, magazines, etc. says that the photographer grants "non-exclusive rights" for use. Here is a quote from the Stock Photo Price Calculator "All prices assume one time non exclusive reproduction rights. Copyright should NEVER be sold. There is NEVER a legitimate reason to transfer Copyright except to deny the creator of the image." --Steve Baskauf 17:57, 4 May 2009 (CEST)
- Also, based on my understanding, a copyright holder does not have to commit to a universal licensing policy on a particular work. For example, if a photographer licenses an image non-exclusively to a text book publisher, then later licenses the same image under a Creative Commons license of BY to the public, the agreement reached with the text book publisher still stands because changing the licensing standard does not negate the agreement reached with the publisher. My point here is that the terms of any licensing agreement are really generally irrelevant to the identity of the copyright holder. In the unlikely event that a copyright holder would assign rights exclusively to someone else, then just put that other person down as the rightsholder. The photographer (i.e. the original copyright holder) is still going to be acknowledged through the creator or credit line elements. I suppose there may be circumstances where copyright owners do not want to manage the licensing of their images and have some other agency manage their licensing. But I don't know how common that is. I think that probably most people who don't care much about licensing their images will just make them available under a CC-BY license. --Steve Baskauf 17:57, 4 May 2009 (CEST)
- Well, in Europe it is not presently practical for someone in one EU country to make a mail order CD purchase from an online seller in another country, due to differing complexity of copyright laws. See E.U. to Hear Proposal for Cross-Border Net Copyright", NY Times May 4 2009. I suppose a careful, commercial, image copyright owner faces a similar issue in the case the electronic copy is to be made in several countries. Will they give photo agencies in different countries the re-licensing rights for those countries? Ivan Teague might weigh in here. --BobMorris 07:11, 5 May 2009 (CEST)
- I see the question as what the scope of rightsHolder is. Steve is arguing that it should only contain rightHolders that are able to relicense. The official definition is: "A person or organization owning or managing rights over the resource." In my understanding this includes license owners like owners or licenses an image non-exclusively to a text book publisher. This implies that a list of rightsHolders is of little use to media repository users, because it does not allow to identify the one rightHolder that has the right to re-license. --GregorHagedorn 00:14, 6 May 2009 (CEST)
- My conceptualization of how to handle this element is still being hampered by a lack of understanding of who our provider clientele is, i.e. who do we actually think is going to be using the MRTG standards? We are spending a lot of time thinking about complicated licensing situations and I'm trying to imagine how often they are actually going to arise. Maybe part of the problem is that we are confusing the question "how do I buy one?" with the question "how do I obtain permission to use the resource in some other product I am creating?".
It seems to me that the most likely circumstances involving the description of "raw" resources (e.g. individual images) will be:
1. Copyright holders make media available under some version of Creative Commons BY (in which licensing issues are irrelevant) or BY-NC and deal with the licensing issues themselves.
2. Copyright holders turn over the licensing of their work to some kind of management agency who deals with the hassles of licensing for a cut of the fees.
In either of these circumstances, the schema element that is relevant to the user is the one that answers the question "who do I contact to obtain permission (i.e. a license) to use the resource" (whatever that element ultimately may be called).
The more complicated circumstances that we are envisioning seem to me to be likely to be cases of commercial products that are composites of multiple raw resources (e.g. books, commercial software, media collection CDs that contain many images created by many photographers) where the primary purpose is to make money, not to document biodiversity. The most relevant question for these kinds of resources is "how do I buy one", not "how do I license it". For example, if someone wants to use an image they see in a field guide, they can't license it from the copyright owner of the field guide anyway - they need to contact the copyright owner of the actual image.
The exception to this might be films, which are commercial products that aren't necessarily put together from raw media resources owned by others. But again, it seems to me that the most likely question here is "how do I buy one" not "how do I license it". If someone does want to license the use of part of a film, it seems like there should be ample opportunity to put information in the proposed License Statement element about how to contact the producer for such permissions.
I really think we are making a "mountain out of a mole hill". Keep it simple in version 1.0 and just put in some element that tells a user who to contact for licensing permission. If it turns out that there are complaints that the schema can't handle frequently-occurring complicated circumstances, then add elements in a future version. After all, isn't this schema extensible?
On the subject of keeping some kind of list "rightsHolders" that includes all of the agents who have licensed the work, that seems to me to be irrelevant unless one of them has exclusive rights to use the work. I believe that situation is uncommon. It also seems to me that it would be relatively uncommon for there to be multiple parties who would be authorized to license a resource. Again, I would argue for simplicity and to get more complicated only if experience shows that to be necessary.
--Steve Baskauf 19:23, 7 May 2009 (CEST)
I need to read the above more fully, but just for quick comment, there are many cases where rights, owners, and licenses do not all overlap. In our library (NBII LIFE), we have legacy collections that we own, but which the heirs of the collection still maintain the rights to; to these collections we have added a Creative Commons license (with their permission); and the USGS has received a permanent, full license to use these images for our own purposes. For our library's users, we provide a "Responsible Party" contact for users to contact to seek permission for use beyond what is provided with the image. AnnetteOlson 00:48, 4 February 2010 (CET)
The MARC relator list has Owner listed separately from Creator, Publisher, etc.. So NBII assumes that Creator is the owner, displaying that name in our Rights field, unless the term Owner is specifically selected from the MARC list in our Others Involved field, in which case our Rights field then reflects the owner as the copyright holder.AnnetteOlson 00:48, 4 February 2010 (CET) |
