What about copyright ?
Copyright can be complicated or even confusing. The BnL has cleared all copyrights and permissions related to the data published on this platform. As a result, the BnL can clearly communicate under what conditions the documents can be used.
Clear Copyright
In general, the BnL focuses on releasing datasets where the rights status and permissions allow any user to make the most out of the data. That way, everyone is on the safe side and all available data is easily manageable. The different copyright statuses used in the available datasets are documented below.
Creative Commons
The Creative Commons legal tools are a suite of tools that can help you to provide permission and indicate under what conditions you – as a rights holder – want to make your material available. The suite includes six licenses and two legal tools.
Creative Commons legal tools also include two other tools for specific situations. They respectively allow heritage institutions (or other distributors) to explicitly communicate that copyright has expired on a work (Public Domain Mark), or allow rights holders to waive their copyright and related rights entirely (Creative Commons Zero), effectively dedicating the work to the public domain before the term of protection has ended. CC0Public DomainRights Statements
RightsStatements.org has published a list of 12 standardised rights statements for cultural heritage. These statements are not licenses – they do not give others permission. They are a standardised means to clearly communicate what the copyright status of a work is. This helps users to quickly navigate and search through your entire collection and clearly distinguish which works can be reused, and which can’t.
The BnL actively participated to the workgroup focusing on the technical aspects. This service is entirely based on the best practices related to Linked Data for the descriptions of rights.
Learn More News about BnL’s involvementOut of Copyright Calculator
Documented with the Data
Every dataset on this website comes with a copyright notice that precisely describes the copyright situation. Once you download a dataset, please, read the copyright notice file that comes with it.