Wait. I’ll check with the legal department to find out whether or not you can use that asset and get back to you.
We are all excited about digitizing our assets, repurposing, monetizing and all the other benefits of a good DAM system. However, the one thing that can go missing is the lack of focus on Rights Information Management (RIM). Rights get no respect, and frankly why should it? For content managers, producers, researchers, artists, designers, etc. Rights are a big buzz kill.
But how do you extrapolate and communicate the accurate rights for a particular asset (i.e. A photo or video image) in a timely manner that doesn’t rely on each user having a legal degree or a legal team to dissect? Rights info management is a three-dimensional puzzle. In some instances it may be enough to have the ownership information covered but for many it’s about that along with the rights pertaining to the materials with the asset or within the context of the creation of that asset. You can’t always rely on, “we own that” and then relicense.
At last weeks DAM conference in NY there was only one session that focused on rights metadata management and it was slotted for the last hour of the last day of the conference (proving that it’s the Rodney Dangerfield of DAM metadata). I expect that many DAMsters will be having the AHA! moment in the near future as they start making their assets readily available and then start getting questions like “hey …can I use that image in a …” How will they answer? Will they even know the answer?
The DAM NY session outlined some of the efforts to create a rights standard within PRISM and also gave some great examples of the non-technical challenge the Rights issue presents. It seems to me that there are a couple of realities to confront. Content is most likely be produced faster than rights can be vetted and finalized so there need to be ways to assure that the Rights info is captured as close to the creation as possible. Also, content from existing archives will require documentation review to assess for current markets and distribution channels that didn’t exist during the original production. All of this review needs to be distilled into a small and manageable set of metadata that communicates the state of rights with out leading to misinterpretation or liability, and some but maybe not all of this info needs to travel with the asset throughout out its lifecycle and beyond.
Lastly, Rights information needs to be taken into account when planning on a DAM workflow…why do all the work of digitizing, etc if turns out you can’t use it again. Rights need to get some respect and move further up the food chain before all we have are faster ways of finding the great assets in our collections that we can’t use.
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