Books Rights Registry: There Should Be Standards
One issue that frightens the hell out of me is digital rights. I'm not just talking about DRM. Basically, I mean what happens when - a few years from now - digital formats proliferate and there are more than just a couple of booksellers in the ebook market. What happens when - a few years from that point - those many digital booksellers are also selling PORTIONS of books? Then you have format AND content proliferation across multiple vendors from multiple publishers, with the inevitable intermediation of distributors.
It makes ONIX look like a game of "play house".
At the heart of all this winging and wending and downloading are rights. Rights for the author. Rights for the publisher. Rights for the vendor. Rights attached to format. Rights attached to territory. Rights attached to portions of the whole. And someone - presumably the Books Rights Registry (should the Google settlement actually get settled) will be in charge of keeping track of all that information.
Standards, obviously, are the key here. And there are no standards when it comes to rights. "Worldwide rights, except for Tanzania" is an exaggeration, but not by much. Rights have been negotiated book by book, format by format, over decades.
Some of us in BISG are starting to get concerned about this and are researching what's currently out there to help us come up with standards that will be useful in this new chaotic world. The obvious question is, of course, "What about ACAP?" And we're thinking...not so much.
David Marlin of Metacomet has a great investigation as to why ACAP isn't going to help a great deal. An excerpt:
ACAP has been designed to identify how third party “crawlers” can use content on a website. Therefore, it has an entirely different set of use-cases than is required by a BRR standard. For the BRR, we need to identify content which may or may not be published on a public website. Because it will often not be so published, a standard for crawling web sites is not appropriate.
That leaves open the question of whether we can use the same methodology for identifying usage rights. Again, ACAP is not designed for this purpose. It has a much coarser descriptor of rights than is required. For example, it defines that translation is allowed, but it does not indicate in which markets or which translations. It also does not appear to address non-textual usage (i.e. a dramatic reading of content to be broadcast online).
So now we're going to look at whether ONIX for Licensing Terms can form a good basis for rights standardization. Stay tuned!
What I offer:
