By now you should have a good idea what your data looks like and how copyright works in your jurisdiction. The next step is to pick one or more datasets, this can be an entire collection or a subset of a collection, to put this theory in to practice. To do this, we have developed a couple of guidelines to help you with the selection. 

If you completed the previous task you should have a list of all the data of your institution. Now we're going to divide the sets in 4 categories: Metadata, content in the Public Domain, content of which you own the copyright yourself and content to which third parties own the copyright. 

Who owns Copyright?

Before we continue to divide the data into the before mentioned categories, it's a good idea to take a look at who actually owns copyright in some standard scenarios. The main rule is that the creator/author has the copyright. However there are some exceptions possible. What if someone creates a work in service of someone else or for a company/institution? You have to make a distinction wether the work is created within the terms of a contract of employment or rather as a freelance project. If the work is created by an employer copyright is automatically transferred to they employer, unless otherwise stipulated in the contract of employment. In the case you are working with freelancers or third party creators, it's the opposite. They keep their copyright unless it's explicitly transferred to your institution. 

If your institution is regularly working with freelancers or third party contractors for the management, maintenance or digitization of collections, it might be a good idea to make sure copyrights are always transferred so they can be governed centrally. 

In situations where the original other has passed away and copyright doesn't end, it's automatically transferred to the heirs, in which case you'll have to get permission of all the heirs to make use of the works. 

It get's even more complicated, because the original author can also transfer his copyright or grant exclusive licenses for his work. In this case he usually keeps some properties of his copyright (mostly the so called moral rights in case they exist in your jurisdiction) but the majority of rights now belongs to someone else. Transfer of copyright is a wide spread practice in the world of book publishing and also for audio and video productions. 

Metadata

According the logic in the previous paragraph, copyright on metadata will usually belong to your institution, unless you make use of freelancers or third parties to create meta tags for your collection. If this is the case, it's advised to take a look at these individual contracts to determine wether there's a transfer of copyright or not. 

If your institution owns the copyright you'll have no problem to make the metadata available as free culture data. So metadata sets are usually a good starting point for institutions who want to start to open up their data. 

Public Domain

Public Domain is a situation where works are no longer copyright protect. In this case everyone can make use of the work without the need of permission from someone. Actually u can say that Public Domain is the default setting and that copyright creates a temporary exclusivity for exploitation of the work. If your collections, or parts of it, consist of work in the Public Domain, opening it should pose few problems. If your institutions manages Public Domain works, this does not mean that you own any copyright to them and it's important to make this clear to the users. The perfect way to do this is by using the Creative Commons Public Domain Mark. More about this tool in the next task!

When you live in the EU you can use the Public Domain Calculator that we created for Europeana to determine wether your works are still copyright protected or not. If you live outside of the EU, you should consult your copyright savvy peers or try to build upon your newly acquired knowledge about copyright protection terms in your jurisdiction. 

Works where you own copyright

Depending on your jurisdiction this scenario will be more or less likely. In most cases however institutions won't own copyright to the collections they manage. Exceptions might be works that were commissioned by the institution, photographs taken by the institution (not necessarily if faithful reproductions of 2D works.), texts made by the institution, cases where artists or heirs donate a collection including copyrights to the institution, etc. Even if they exist these works probably don't make up an extensive part of your collection. They still could be useful for reuse by others tough, so try to make these works available as much as possible. 

Since you own the copyright, it's up to you to decide wether you apply a free culture license or not. Off course, we suggest you do, get your works out there and see them getting used in ways you could never imagined! 

Works where third party owns copyright

The categories above pose little to no problems when it comes to opening up your data. Unfortunately most of the times collections will turn out to be in this last category. Here's where the theory gets simple but in practice it might prove to be very difficult to make these works available for reuse. The general rule is that you need permission from the rights-holder to make a work available to the public. As we explained in the first paragraph of this task, the rights holder can be any of a number of people ranging from the original creator, to his heirs, or a professional publisher. If you want to open your collection consisting of works where you don't own copyright, it's up to you to get explicit permission for every work in the collection. In some cases you might be able to strike a deal with a collecting society to grant a blanco license to use the works in exchange for a sum of money, but this technique isn't universal, let alone strictly legal. 

Another option is to just take your chances and open the collection anyway. If rights holders mights turn up, you can always take it down again. Off course this is a decision that shouldn't be made lightly. There is a tool available to assess the risk-factor for your collection, this might come in handy when thinking about this last approach. http://www.web2rights.com/OERIPRSupport/risk-management-calculator/