Asking the question
We visited JISCLegal recently to discuss JISC CASPER, rights management and rights clearance. It was a very helpful meeting, that time and again came back to one simple fact about rights clearance.
“You will always need to ask the question, ‘Who owns this content and have they granted me permission to use that content this way?’”
Now whilst the actual mechanics of identifying different layers of rights within a work, identifying the rights holder and then seeking rights clearance might be complicated, time consuming, onerous and ultimately the last thing that anyone developing e-learning materials really wants to get involved in, keeping those questions in mind should help projects at least stay on the right side of the law.
The meeting also highlighted the importance of policy and decision making by the projects and the institutions themselves. JISCLegal often find themselves in the position of being asked to make a decision for the institution. But this isn’t their role or remit. They are there to offer advice, highlight the issues and point the institution in the right direction.
I wonder whether we will find ourselves in a similar position. JISC CASPER will be doing all that it can to support the projects and steer them in the right direction, but when dealing with rights there will be times - consortia arrangements, orphan works to name but two - when the projects and their institutions will have to make a decision about what they are happy to agree to and the level risk their institutions are happy to take on.
These are decisions that JISC CASPER can’t make for the projects and at this point it will be important for all of the projects to turn their own institutions for the final go ahead.
Generally, it will be important for the RepRODUCE projects to find out what support their institution can offer them, not only those people who can sign off decision based on an analysis of risk and judgement, but also those people responsible for rights clearance. It may be that the library is not the only source of such support, there may be other departments such as research and innovation, who will be used to dealing with IPR and can offer support.
This raises a further question about the degree of expertise available within an institution in these areas, or rather the degree to which an institution acknowledges and communicates the importance of rights across the whole institution its staff and students.
The JISC Legal team also re-iterated a number of other important points that we will and have been making to the projects as we meet them.
1. Make one member of the team responsible for rights management and clearance. They should maintain all of the documentation that the projects gather as they clear rights and be responsible for the arrangements regarding its subsequent curation and maintenance.
2. Some rights holders will require a payment to clear rights and the projects will need to put aside a budget for rights clearance.
3. Rights clearance rakes time - make sure that you plan early and set aside plenty of time for the process.
4. Have back up options for content in case you can’t clear the rights in specific pieces
5. If sourcing content from content sharing sites such as YouTube and Flickr be aware that the material may not have had rights cleared appropriately or even at all.
6. Check your institutions formal policies with regard to copyright.
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