Intellectual Property Rights in Environmental & Natural History Collections: A preliminary discussion Effie Tsiflidou1,2, Alexios Dimitropoulos1,2, Zoi A. Makrodimitri1,3, Nikos Palavitsinis1,2 1
Greek Research & Technology Network (GRNET), Greece 2 Agro-Know Technologies, Greece 3 National Centre for Scientific Research “Demokritos”, Institute of Physical Chemistry, Molecular Thermodynamics and Modelling of Materials Laboratory, Greece
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Abstract. In an era where digitization and networking technologies offer a new way for environmental and natural history institutions, like natural history museums and science centers, to promote their services to the general public, new challenges rise on the field on intellectual property rights. Natural Europe project aim is to make natural history knowledge accessible on an open access basis to a wide spectrum of end-users, through Europeana portal. The value the project delivers is not merely in making works available online, but in the open access terms under which the works are available. Therefore understanding Intellectual Property considerations is fundamental in achieving this goal. The aim of this paper is to enable a further discussion on issues concerning the intellectual property rights for environmental and natural history collections. Keywords: Intellectual Property Rights, cultural collections, natural history
1
Introduction
The last few years the way that intellectual property rights (IPR) operate has been completely changed due to the technological development and more particular the spread of online activities. IPR comprise patents, trademarks, designs and geographical indications, as well as copyright (authors' rights) and rights related to copyright (for performers, producers and broadcasters) [1]. Today’s digital technologies allow perfect, inexpensive and unlimited copying and dissemination of content – legal or otherwise. On one hand stands the need for adequate protection of creators and their work, while on the other hand free distribution of work boosts the development of the Information Society as a whole - as they say “knowledge stands on the shoulders of giants”. IPR rules therefore need to be adapted to our digital
times. A balance must be found between the interests of right holders and users, in order to protect the originality and enable legal or licensed re-use by others. In general, copyright grants exclusive but limited rights to the creator of an original work to copy, reproduce, perform and distribute it. From its inception, however, copyright law has been as much about the promotion and circulation of knowledge and good ideas as it is about the protection and rewarding of creators [2]. Limitations and exemptions to creators' copyright protection are as important to society as the protection itself. Significant users and creators of copyright content are cultural institutions, like libraries, museums and archives. Cultural institutions provide a site where the interests and activities of many people converge, including entities with very different powers in relation to the circulation of cultural works; authors, artists and other creators; commercial publishers; researchers; educators; and the general public. As well as their public interest missions of preservation, access, research and education, cultural institutions may also have quasi-commercial arms involved in publishing and product development [3]. According to the National Initiative for a Networked Cultural Heritage (NINCH) working group on best practices, cultural institutions are primarily interested in two of the many issues that surround copyright: how they can legally digitize material in which they may not hold the copyright and how they can ensure that no one else can use the materials they have digitized without their approval [2]. Europeana1, Europe’s digital library, museum and archive, is the focus of a number of IPR issues, as the portal provides access to three sets of assets: the Open Source code base, the authority-controlled metadata and the digitized content [4]. The main rights concerns are around the digitization of public domain content and orphan works. Compared to the aforementioned literature aim of this paper is to focus on the IPR issues that arise for environmental and natural history digital collections. First chapter stands as an introduction on IPR issues in relation to cultural digital collections and related literature. In the second chapter Natural Europe project is presented. In the third chapter similar projects managing natural history, environmental or biodiversity content are examined, in relation to IPR issues and the policy that they follow. In chapter four, after presenting the types of natural history content provided for Natural Europe, it is analyzed the methodology followed for the selection of IPR scheme in the context of the project. In the same chapter follows a discussion on the IPR and the metadata, in first place how IPR are described in the metadata schema used by Natural Europe and then under what licenses the metadata generated within the project are classified. In the last chapter
2
Background
Natural history Museums (MNHs) form a rich source of knowledge about the natural history and the biodiversity of a particular region, thus they provide content which 1
http://europeana.eu/portal/
can be characterized as cultural heritage content. Natural Europe project2 aims to bring together digital collections from NHMs around Europe and connect them with Europeana portal. Additionally, on the intentions of the project is to study the educational methods and deploy the necessary software tools that will allow museum educators to design innovative online pathways through the digital collections of NHMs. To this end, the federation of the Natural Europe digital libraries aims to facilitate: storage, search and retrieval of digital content that is related to Natural History. In Natural Europe project participate five (5) NHMs and a Science Center (SC) from six different European countries (Hungary, Greece, Portugal, Estonia, Germany and Finland). Concerning the digital content provided by NHMs in the context of Natural Europe project, this estimated on 16.000 resources of natural history content. Table 1. NHMs participating and providing content in the context of Natural Europe Project. Country
Name of Institution
Hungary
Hungarian Natural History Museum (HNHM)
Greece
Natural History Museum of Crete (NHMC)
Portugal
Natural History Museum of Lisbon (MNHNL)
Estonia
Estonian Natural History Museum (TNHM)
Germany
Jura-Museum Eichstatt (JME)
Finland
Arctic Center (AC)
The next chapter is an attempt to study similar projects managing natural history, environmental or biodiversity content, in relation to IPR issues and the policy that they follow.
3
IPR in Cultural Collections
This chapter describes the way in which relevant initiatives work with IPR issues. In order to understand particularities inherent in cultural heritage objects we studied the policy followed by other similar projects. For the purpose of this paper three different but relevant projects are presented, the BHL- Europe project, the Sterna initiative and the OpenUp! project. BHL-Europe project aims to make available Europe’s biodiversity information to everyone by improving the interoperability of European biodiversity digital libraries. BHL-Europe content is available under the Creative Commons 3 licensing.
2 3
http://www.natural-europe.eu/ http://creativecommons.org/
Birds and all kinds of information related to birds are at the core of the STERNA digital library. It brings together and presents all sorts of multimedia resources on birds, bird species and their habitats in one information space. STERNA IPR issues regarding a source are the sole responsibility of the partner who provides that source. The following picture presents an example of a copyright statement on a STERNA library object. Opening Up the Natural History Heritage for Europeana is another initiative that provides natural history multimedia content with specific biological and multilingual functionality to a wide European cultural audience through EUROPEANA. For the IPR framework OpenUp! is adapting the IPR agreements currently used by its partners when releasing their multi-media content. Project name BHL-Europe Sterna library OpenUp!
4 4.1
URL http://www.bhl-europe.eu/ http://www.sterna-net.eu/ http://open-up.eu/
Type of license Creative Commons Partners IPR agreements Partners IPR agreements
IPR in Natural Europe Types of Natural History Content Provided for Natural Europe
The main aim of the Natural Europe project is to make natural history knowledge accessible on an open access basis to a wide spectrum of end-users, through Europeana portal. The value the project delivers is not merely in making works available online, but in the open access terms under which the works are available. Therefore understanding Intellectual Property considerations is fundamental in achieving this objective. The digital content that will be available online through the project mainly consists of text, like scientific descriptions of animals or plants; images depicting natural history objects in low or high resolution; videos and animations of natural phenomena and animals; sounds of animals; educational pathways that will be created by museum educators or teachers. Moreover, copyright issues concern also the metadata provided for the description of the digital content and for the educational pathways.
4.2
Selected IPR for Natural Europe Digital Content
In order to select the appropriate IPR schemes for the Natural Europe project we have examined existing IPR schemes that gain wide acceptance, like Creative Commons and Europeana Classification.
Additionally, a discussion with Natural Europe museum partners has taken place during the 2nd project meeting focused on copyright issues related to the digital content of NHMs. The discussion was based on three parameters/ questions Is commercial use allowed? Are modifications allowed? Is the content public/ free for use? Museum curators and educators mentioned that licensing is much depended on the types of the content resolution available and on the indented use. Thus, for example, for content that is used for educational purposes predominates the idea of free use. Fig. 1 conceptualizes the discussion with museum curators and educators on IPR during the 2nd meeting project.
Fig. 1: Drawing the concept of IPR issues for NHMs during the 2nd project meeting in Athens Concerning the requirements for Natural Europe, museum partners mentioned that they would like to have the possibility of applying different IPR schemas to their items. Most of the provided content will be under the Creative Commons license “Attribution Non-commercial” (BY-NC), but occasionally might appear some restrictions. Rather rarely some content will be free of any restrictions. Additionally, they would like the target users of the Natural Europe services to be able to add
suitable data or metadata to the existing objects, but only in a way that the original data can't be changed. Eliciting the IPR requirements related to the digital collections from the project meeting an IPR Scheme is under development that will be comprised by the following schemes: • Creative Commons o Public Mark • Europeana Classification • Copyright Statement (free text) Examining all the different IPR schemes available as well as others used by similar initiatives, we have concluded that although a single type of IPR scheme may be applied to describe all cultural content in Natural Europe, it definitely has to be distinguished amongst the different types of material being licensed. In Natural Europe licenses are provided for two different categories of content. One is the cultural heritage objects provided by NHMs collections and the other is the educational material i.e. the educational pathways. Table 2 depicts all the types of material available in Natural Europe, along with the proposed copyrights for each type. Table 2: CC Licenses for Natural Europe
Metadata
Content Type
BY Text Images (law resolution) Images (high resolution) Videos Sounds Educational Pathways Metadata for CHO Metadata for Pathways
CC Licenses BY-NC BY-ND
BY-NCND
BY-SA
BY-NCSA X X
X X X X X X
4.3
4.3.1
IPR and Metadata
IPR in Metadata
For the description of cultural heritage objects that will be populated in the context of Natural Europe project has been developed an application profile based on the Europeana Semantic Elements specification [5]. More specifically, for the indication of the usage and the access rights to the digital object has been used the elements Europeana:rights and dc:rights. The dc:rights element (Table 3) is used as a free text, where the Europeana:rights element (Table 4) applies a controlled vocabulary [6]. Table 3: Dc:rights element from ESE specification version 3.4 Element name: rights Namespace URI Label Definition Europeana note Obligation & Occurrence Europeana search and display features Example
4.3.2
Dc http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/rights Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource. Information about intellectual Property Rights, access rights or license arrangements for the digital object (digitized or born digital). Simple Facet Timeline Advance Full search search search result display X X (Rights line) Copyright © British Library Board, BBC and contributors
IPR for Metadata
Metadata in Natural Europe concern (a) the metadata generated from museum curators annotating Cultural Heritage Objects (CHO) and (b) the metadata generated from educators creating educational pathways. All the metadata produced by Natural Europe are characterized under the Creative Commons licensing and more specifically under the Non-Commercial –Non derivatives for CHO metadata and Non-Commercial –Share Alike (NC-SA) for Educational metadata (as shown in Table 2).
Table 4: Dc:rights element from ESE specification version 3.4 Element name: rights Namespace URI Label Definition Europeana note
Obligation & Occurrence Europeana search and display features Example
5
Europeana http://www.europeana.eu/schemas/ese/rights Europeana Rights Information about copyright of the digital object as specified by isShownBy and isShownAt The value is a URL constructed according to the specifications in the “Rights Guidelines” document on the Technical Requirements page at: http://version1.europeana.eu/web/guest/technical-requirements/ The URLs are constructed by adding a code indicating the copyright status of an object to the domain name where that status is defined. For users of Europeana.eu this copyright information also applies to the preview specified in europeana:object. The rights statement will be represented as a badge on the object page and as a text string in the metadata display. The provision of this element has an obligation level of “recommended” in this version of ESE. It will be changed to “Mandatory” in a later version. Simple Facet Timeline Advance Full search search search result display X http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Conclusions and Directions for Future Research
This paper presented the process of defining IPR for environmental and natural history digital content. In order to select the appropriate IPR schemes for the Natural Europe project existing IPR schemes that gain wide acceptance, like Creative Commons and Europeana Classification, have been extensively examined. Furthermore, the discussion with museum curators has been considered very valuable for understanding in depth the needs of the natural history museums rights holders and users. According to this, what is notable is the fact that museum curators find important to preserve the copyrights in the institution, but use the Share Alike option from Creative Commons, for educational purposes. In general, is very common in cultural institutions to offer flexibility in copyrights for educational purposes. In addition, a further discussion should be encouraged concerning the Public Mark option provided by Europeana, facilitating access to cultural heritage among general public. The present study was based on a preliminary survey of existing IPR schemas and it combined user generated requirements to define an IPR scheme for a specific natural
history collection. An interesting extension of this paper could examine the actual use of IPR at collection level by other projects / museums that offer their content online.
6
Acknowledgments
The work presented in this paper has been funded with support by the European Commission, and more specifically the project “Natural Europe: Natural History & Environmental Cultural Heritage in European Digital Libraries for Education” of the ICT PSP Programme. All authors have been supported with funding by GRNET during the implementation of this work, in the context of the above mentioned EU project.
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