Cc-europe mailing list

[Paul Keller <pk AT kl.nl>]

Hi all, 
first of all thanks john for your take on this, this is why we see CC0 as 
perfectly usable for europeana as well. i guess this is also why a number of 
reputable europeana organizations (the British Library, CERN, ...) are 
comfortable with releasing (meta)data under CC0.

Anyway, it cant harm to give a quick summary of what we are doing with 
Europeana. We in this case refers to Patrick Peiffer (Bibliotheque National 
du Luxembourg), Lucie Guibault (IVIR) and myself (Kennisland). As you will 
note this overlaps with the teams behind CC-LUX and CC-NL, but we are doing 
this in the name of our own organizations who are participants in the 
EuropeanaConnect project, where we run a work-package that is tasked with 
developing a Europeana LIcensing Framework. We are doing this in close 
corporation with the Europeana Foundation (which runs Europeana) and there 
are 100s of stakeholders involved (the cultural heritage institutions of 
Europe)

In very simple terms Europeana is a specialized search portal. Europeana does 
not crawl the web, but it works on the basis of metadata that is provided to 
it by the so called data-providers. these actively make available metadata 
and previews to european. Europeana uses the data it receives to provide the 
serach functionality (and display results that link to the original objects 
on the pages of the dat provider) and it also makes the metadata available 
via a API and will publish all the metadata as linked open data. (not the 
previews are only used to illustrate search results)

In order to make this possible, there are so called data provider agreements 
between the data providers and europeana. the current data provider 
agreements only allow for non commercial use and also contain a share alike - 
like provision (see: http://www.europeana.eu/portal/termsofservice.html) as 
you will not these terms look a lot like a CC-BY-NC-SA license but they are 
not (the reason has to do with database rights, but that is another 
discussion). 

At the time when these agreements where needed to get Europeana working (last 
spring) this BY-NC-SA like construction was the best that we could get 
everybody to agree on. obviously it is not a very good construction (because 
it is (a) non standard and (b) contains the NC restriction which does not 
make a lot of sense in a Linked Open Data environment) and we have spend the 
last year on working towards a better solution.

This has resulted in a proposal for a new data provider agreement that would 
allow Europeana to publish the data it receives under CC0. A first version of 
this proposal has been circulated in december (and i guess that is what 
Alek's contact is referring to) and we have been working with the feedback 
that we have received on an updated version that will be circulated (among 
europeana stakeholders) later this month. It does indeed push for CC0 as the 
standard legal tool, and as indicated above that is what we think is best 
suited for the situation at hand. There are a number of considerations for 
this: 

- we want to place as little restrictions on reuse as possible 
- we want to use a standard legal tool
- we are talking about descriptive (and for the majority factual) metadata 
here (which in most cases does not fall under ©protection anyway) 
- the majority of the data comes from publicly funded institutions

if you have read the 'the new renaissance' report by the 'Comité des sages, 
you might also remember that this is in line with one of their main 
recommendations:

> Metadata related to the digitized objects produced by the cultural 
> institutions should be widely and freely available for re-use. (p.5)


right now it is unclear if we will get this CC0 based approach accepted by 
all Europeana stakeholders, but there are some promising signs and we are 
working really had on this, doing lots of workshops etc... To get back to 
Aleks question, we really think that CC0 is the best tool for this situation 
and we do not worry about it being inadequate (as John points out the 
fallback license does not impose a BY requirement so there really is no need 
to worry about it being inadequate). Happy to answer more specific questions 
on this as well.

best, paul 

p.s the Europeana licensing framework mentioned above contains a number of 
other elements. among them are standard terms for submitting user generated 
content to Europeana and it's partners (they mandate that the content can be 
made available under CC-BY-SA and metadata under CC0). in addition Europeana 
also allows for communicating the licensing terms of the underlying digital 
objects held by the data providers in its metadata and supports all Creative 
Commons licenses as rights statements.






On 8 Mar 2011, at 12:38, John Hendrik Weitzmann wrote:

> Hi Alek et al,
> 
> the fallback in CC0 is less than CC BY, because it lacks the BY. So it's 
> basically an unconditional perpetual world-wide license for everyone. 
> That's why I think it is not really a big deal if someone points to CC0's 
> waiver being disfunctional in Europe. The fallback is just as good legally 
> :)
> 
> Best
> John
> 
> 
> 
> Am 08.03.2011 11:47, schrieb Paul Keller:
>> Hi Alex and all,
>> i can give a lot of background information on this (this is something that 
>> we are working on with europeana), but i will be offline for the rest of 
>> today so i wont be able to do so before tomorrow... /paul
>> 
>> On 8 Mar 2011, at 11:13, Alek Tarkowski wrote:
>> 
>>> Dear all,
>>> 
>>> I've just been told by a POlish librarian working for Europeana Local
>>> that Europeana is considering using CC0 for metadata. THis means of
>>> course, that the mechanism would be pushed to a broad range of digital
>>> libraries in Europe.
>>> 
>>> Since this will be something that will affect us all, I wonder whether
>>> we shouldn't have a common position on this. My worry relates to the
>>> well known problems with whether CC0 is a valid mechanism in European
>>> legal systems. I know there is the CC BY fallback, , and some reasons to
>>> use a disfunctional mechanism with a functional fallback (to make a
>>> statement with how this should be done, as opposed to can be done) - but
>>> I still feel uneasy with this solution, if we'll de facto end up using
>>> CC BY for metadata, why not just license it with CC BY? It's a quite
>>> confusing construction in an already esoteric field of metadata licensing.
>>> 
>>> Paul, I assume you might know a lot about this, I'd be happy to learn
>>> what you think.
>>> 
>>> And grateful for any other thoughts.
>>> 
>>> As a side note, in Poland we haven't implemented CC0 for abovementioned
>>> reasons - anyone else has the same problem? Or even better, anyone has
>>> found a working solution for this, a way to think about CC0 in their
>>> jurisdiction?
>>> 
>>> Cheers,
>>> 
>>> Alek
>>> 
>>> --
>>> dr Alek Tarkowski
>>> koordynator / public lead
>>> Creative Commons Polska / Poland
>>> www: http://creativecommons.pl
>>> identica: http://identi.ca/alek
>>> twitter: http://twitter.com/atarkowski
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> CC-Europe mailing list
>>> CC-Europe AT lists.ibiblio.org
>>> http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/cc-europe
>> 
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