After a really useful discussion with a legal expert from Jisc I have been encouraged to create this ‘short form’ post about the legal issues connected to our proposed development of the Clipper toolkit.
It’s basically good news. The Clipper toolkit bring no more risks that any other web publishing activity. The really positive thing to come out of the discussions was that using Clipper does indeed provide a way of helping users comply with existing rights conditions. In practice this means that adding a Clipper toolkit to an existing collection or data service should help protect that content and reassure the rights owners that their content is safe – because only users with the rights to access to the content can use the toolkit.
Understandably, rights owners are very nervous about misuse of their content especially those in the broadcast sector – due to the complexity of the rights ‘chains’ involved. What would be really great is to create some exemplars to illustrate this in practice – explaining things in words is all very well but showing it to people is most effective. Recent discussions with colleagues from the EUSCREEN project will hopefully provide an opportunity to do so in the near future with some archived content. If Clipper goes to the next round of funding that will be a priority.