Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Use Rights Brainstorming

One conversation from our kickoff meeting which is worth continuing is our discussion about creating a use rights agreement. Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh raised the issue, saying that he thinks it is important to create something simple and straightforward, granting the AAMHC and the Zuni tribe free access to use the material in the catalog, provided that the DNMS (or whichever institution) and the photographer are acknowledged.

Also, the point was raised that we may need to include something in the use agreement about the copyrights of individual artists, since some of our partners (most notably, the Denver Museum of Art) are contributing objects made by known, and often living, artists who still retain copyrights to their work.

Jim Enote also pointed out that we might want to put in an additional caveat that Zuni tribe gets to review what is being published based on the comments that they have shared. However, this is not so straightforward a request, given what happens after things get published and then they're "in the literature"-- at that point it might be too hard to enforce that condition of review by the tribe.

Robin Boast pointed out that we might benefit from looking into Creative Commons licensing, since what we're talking about is essentially what they call an "Attribution NonCommercial license".

Also, it might make sense to have two use agreements, one from the content partners to AAMHC, the other from the AAMHC to the content partners. After some thought, here is a draft of what I came up with:

[from content partners to AAMHC]
We grant free access to A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center and the Zuni Tribe to use the material within this database, provided the [institution name] and photographer are acknowledged in all uses, and that the copyrights of individual artists are respected when appropriate.

[from AAMHC to content partners]
We grant free access to [content partner] to use the material within this database, provided the authors are acknowledged in all uses (and that the AAMHC is able to review any work that is published based on the research provided in this database).

These are just preliminary ideas, and will quite possibly change and develop in the coming months.

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