Making assessments about the copyright status of a work remains a challenge notwithstanding the tools that CC has developed over the years, such as the Public Domain Mark and CC0. It is also hard to communicate to end users about the laws that apply to their particular use of a work. Copyright is jurisdiction based, which means each country has their own copyright and public domain rules. These differing laws presents challenges for digitizers of content and reusers of digital online surrogates.
Several efforts and projects offer partial solutions for these challenges; however they tend to serve single jurisdiction or regional needs, are loosely coordinated, and are not integrated into a unified solution that works starting from the moment of digitization and continuing through to the public that encounters them over the Internet. Ideally, the public domain is the easiest part of the knowledge commons to assess and reuse, but the current environment makes it challenging at each stage in the process of getting that content to a public.
Creative Commons and other key stakeholders such as Wikimedia brought forth this Project for initial discussion with our community and stakeholders at the CC 2019 Global Summit in Lisbon. The outcomes of the 4 hours session at the Summit can be found [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Sl5eFsodKnw0BWhgyMHuOyU94B4RanjYYsp4IwPm_BA/edit# here].
At this session, we expect to be able to follow on some of the data modelling challenges in relationship with the [https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Help:Copyrights Help:Copyrights] page on Wikidata. We want to gather feedback and input from the community that is working in the intersection of GLAM institutions and Wikidata.
Creative Commons will bring some of its legal expertise on copyright and open licensing, and we expect to engage more with the Wikidata community to leverage the different languages and community needs, and better refine our initial project.