Connections

NEW YORK — The Rights & Metadata Madness conference kicked off July 20 with a detailed explanation by Greg Cram, associate director of copyright and information Policy for the New York Public Library (NYPL), on why rights metadata management is so important, especially for a nonprofit like NYPL.

“We face a common question that we all need to answer and share a common problem that we ought to deal with, and that question that we often struggle to answer is a very basic one: Can we use this?” Cram said. It’s a “deceptively simple question … but answering that question on an asset by asset basis can be really, really challenging in its own right,” he said.

“Answering that question at scale and at speed can feel nearly impossible,” he went on to say, adding: “The common problem that we face is tackling how to translate intellectual property considerations and contractual considerations to machine-readable and, hopefully, machine-actionable code.”

Six years ago, that very question was asked at NYPL about all the content that it had been digitizing for the past 10 years, and they didn’t like the answer, Cram said. It was “so concerning” because there had, after all, been a significant change in how libraries stored data, he said.

Just a few years ago, 1.6 million research items were used by the library’s researchers from the library stacks for people to use on site, an increase from past years, he said. But, at the same time, it served more than 127 million digital objects to its users – “an 80 times difference” from the past, he said, calling that a “dramatic shift for us.” The focus was on physical items for the past 100 years, but now NYPL is digitizing more of its content to meet the needs of its users, he said.

That shift from physical objects to digital ones “has a few different implications” for libraries including NYPL, he said. Libraries must now digitize their assets/collections for preservation and for access to the public, making it easier for users to access content wherever they are, he said. So, NYPL is trying to get its content and assets out to as many different channels as possible, he said. To that end, it’s sharing access with third-party aggregators including the Digital Public Library of America, he said. And NYPL has found that the more its content is shared with third parties, the more the content is accessed by the public, he said.

But the third implication of the shift to digitization is copyright liability, which can be “awfully scary” because statutory damages can be up to $150,000 per work infringed, he said. If NYPL digitized an item 10 times that would mean potentially $1.5 million in damages, but “we usually digitize in the thousands,” he said, so the worst-case scenario is much worse than $1.5 million. “Those numbers for a non-profit get really scary really, really quickly,” he said.

“Because those stakes are so high, libraries have invested” heavily to make it easier to keep track of what rights they have for the content they are using to avoid legal problems, he said. To manage the risk, they need rights metadata and NYPL developed its own rights metadata management system to keep track of it all, he said.

Fair use is a very important right and exception to copyright law, so it’s important to know what content an institution like NYPL has that falls under fair use, he said.
Now, fair use means an author’s life plus 70 years, he said, adding it was previously much shorter than that. Contracts/licenses, meanwhile, always overrule the default copyright laws, he noted.

Rights metadata is made up of several components, including how a work was acquired and whether an organization – in this case, NYPL — received anything else with it, including contracts and licenses, he said. Also key to keep track of are facts relevant to the copyright status of a work and information about the work including when it was published and who the author is, he said. Having all that information at hand quickly and easily can save all sorts of headaches for an organization, he said.