So you decided to go through with this? That's great! 

Before we continue with the practical stuff you'll have to know more about the way we handle collections and copyright. Copyright is a fairly complicated topic to tackle as it varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. This makes it almost impossible to write an universal course on the copyright issues in cultural collections and open data. However there are some common ground rules that need to be understood before opening cultural data. These include the distinction between content and metadata, multilayers of copyright, the distinction between a reproduction and a new work and most importantly the duration of copyright protection.

No matter what your institution is savegarding or showcasing, chances are that your data consists of content and something called metadata. Metadata are the descriptive tags you add to the objects in your database to provide them with context and improve searchability. Metadata can inlcude any kind of describing data like dates, names of authors, geographical information, etc. For opening up your collections, we make the distinction between content and metadata because they generally have a different set of rights attached to them.

All digitized cultural objects like scanned paintings, photographed objects and digital texts are content. In most cases, the content in your collection will be created by others. This means that copyright to these works does not belong to your institution, but to a large number of different authors. This can make it quite hard to make these objects available as open data. If you don't the intellectual property rights to a work, you'll need to ask permission from those who do before you can make it public. For metadata this will seldom be the case. Metadata will mostly be created by your own institution and it isn't even always clear if metadata is subject to copyright or not.

To establish copyright, there is some sort of personal input from the creator required. When we are talking about factual data like dates, names, etc., the general rule is that they aren't copyrightable. When the metadata includes more elaborate descriptions that transcend factuality, copyright could be involved, but this depends very much on the copyright system you are in. When you wrote the descriptions yourself, you own the copyright and it's up to you to share this data with whoever you want. for the purpose of this challenge we will assume that all cultural data, images and metadata, are copyright protected. We have to assume this because open data is likely to be used internationally and we need to achieve that a work is usable for everyone.

Copyright protection is temporary. It protects a creator of a work for a certain perdiod of time. In Europe this term is harmonised at 70 years after the dead of the longest living author. Worldwide however it varies per jurisdiction. Mexico for example grants protection up until 100 years after the dead of longest living author, whereas China only grants protection for 30 years after publication. When copyright expires a work falls in the public domain. Everyone can freely copy and distribute a public domain work without having to ask permission. Check the term of protection in your own country to see which works can be freely copied and distributed in your jurisdiction. Cultural institutions cannot claim copyright on works that have fallen into the public domain.

Reproductions have the same rights as the original. When you reproduce a work, make a scan or copy, the new works retains the copyright protection of the original. This is also true for taking non-creative head-on photographs of 2D objects like paintings of photographs. Because rights are not renewed with each copy, the reproduction will fall into the public domain at the same time as the original does

A work can also have multiple layers of copyright. When you take a photograph that consists of a copyrighted work in the background, you need to have permission to distribute and copy that image from all the rights owners whose works is depicted in the photo. A cultural institution needs to have the rights to distribute the content and/or metadata of works to distribute a dataset under an open license. Cultural Data cannot be shared openly without the works being either in the public domain or without permission of all the copyright owners of a work.

¹This is one of those rules that differ in some jurisdictions. Pivotal is how a work is defined: if a copyrighted work is defined with rules of originality these paragraph holds. If on the other hand a sweat of the brow doctrine applies to jurisdiction you need check your local laws.