The mission of the service is to enable cultural institutions to make it easier to access and reuse digital content by using standardised “rights statements” that indicate clearly the rights applicable to such content. The long-term aim is to establish RightsStatements.org as a global standard.

The BnL’s contributions and objectives 

The BnL has been an active participant in the working party defining technical implementation. The service is based entirely on linked data technologies using best current practices for describing rights.

The motivation for the BnL’s participation in the project lies in its conviction that the succinct and standardised description of rights is a key element in implementing a digital infrastructure allowing the transition from immense collections of national printed material to a digital environment. Attracting an infrastructure of this type to the Grand Duchy enables the BnL to fall in line with the country’s policy objectives of becoming established as a player in the management of digital content. 

As the first neutral rights statements service for the world’s cultural sector, RightsStatements.org is a promising basis not only for registers of works but also for services clarifying international rights, making it possible to optimise access to copyrighted content that is not currently available on the Internet.

For the BnL, RightsStatements.org is the continuation of its IPR projects for Europeana. It was responsible in 2011 for the setting up of the Europeana Licensing Framework, and for the service for calculating the duration of protection for various categories of works for thirty jurisdictions (www.outofcopyright.eu).

Available rights statements 

RightsStatements.org offers eleven different rights statements, covering the various situations encountered by cultural institutions when digitising their collections: five statements cover copyrighted works, four cover works for which copyright has lapsed (thereby supplementing Creative Commons tools such as  Public Domain Mark and CC0), and the last two cover situations where rights are uncertain. 

Objectives for 2016

• the gradual linking of the statements provided by RightsStatements.org to the 13 million items of content available via the DPLA (Digital Public Library of America, www.dp.la),
• the migration of 50 million items of digitised content currently available via the ‘Europeana’ European digital library (www.europeana.eu) to the RightsStatements.org infrastructure,
• the setting up of an international governance structure, including continuation of the initial discussions with cultural institutions in countries not included in the “global north”, such as Brazil and China.