Digital Rights

Below a list of talking points essential for any publicly accessible website hosting digitized publications.

The situation regarding access to digitized works is characterized by mostly one of two extremes: prohibitive rules of access, which are mostly the result of the publishing industries’ FUD campaign, or a general permission to access and reuse their material, without going too much into detail (and, unfortunately, therefore defining the exact rights).

Instead, each site — and maybe each collection inside a site — should have its distinct, exactly specified policy regarding use, access, reuse of its material, for the sake of research and the future of digitizations.

Scope:

• commercial use forbidden
• private use only
• scientific use only
• limited access to known users only

Time:

• limited time only (e.g. project)
• unlimited access

Reuse:

• no further distribution
• only by granting the same rights / obligations
• only for scientific use
• only with written consent of owner
• freely distributable (common domain)

Display on Website:

• provenance of original (logo / link)
• digitization provider
• copyright holder
• rights / restrictions to the material

Download possibilities:

• no download (i.e. only visible online)
• low-res scans
• high-res scans
• complete edition as pdf