[ENRIQUE ALONSO GARCIA]

Thanks Bernard
I think this view, without prejudice to refinements, was shared by all. This problem (the legal status of metadata itself, understood in the classic meaning of metadata: data about data) was addressed indirectly by point 8 of the draft Principle 5 (both drafts 1 and 2). The way it looks conceded that there were unclear principles about it and the text reflected the core understanding under EU (mainly German) law. But as Simon said, building on the debate triggered by your comment, concerning this part of principle 5 we should be cautious and address it as we address the status of data itself, as fact or expression, and with differences between publicly funded data and private data.. So, we all think -that is my understanding- more or less the same, independently of final draft.
The main problem we still have doubts about is not over the metadata in this classic sense (data about the technical characteristics and location of the research data) which is the one addressed in the previous paragraph, but a new and different issue/problem: should the metadata include, in addition to its current usual content, also something about the data that is usually never expressed (until now) on the typical metadata (i.e., in the URIs and namespaces)? And this “new” type (or extension) of classic metadata is one that refers not to data (it is not data about data) but to the statement of rights understood to be “attached” to the data: i.e. whether the data itself is public domain, licensed, copyrighted… (data about the legal status of the data from the point of IPRs).
Looking to ongoing experiences, this “new” trend can be very useful because it would “force” the provider to give more or less accurate information (through metadata) to the final user of the data [as well as to the intermediary (e.g. an infrastructure, a database or a web service provider..)] about what is the legal openness of the data, thus providing (sometimes even in a machine-readable way) certainty to the user about what is type and extension of access and use/reuse capability of the data that he/she has. This new and different part of principle 5 is the one that raises the questions addressed on points 1 to 5 of the implementation guidelines. And those questions are (in an ad exemplum list): whether metadata are capable of being specific enough about those rights, whether it would be useful to develop such metadata or these metadata “lines” of “strings” could introduce more confusion, whether it should reflect the knowledge or understanding about public domain or IPRs that the provider has or instead the reality and clearly defined status of such rights (so, theis metadata provider should be held liable if he/she is not right about the exact scpe of IPRs over the data as expressed in these metadata), and/or whether this RDA -CODATA IG should even “create” or recommend scientists to adhere to one or several of already existing ones (such as those “established under NISO, GEO spatial, DPLA-Europeana… all of which have created and reached consensus -or are very close to- on rights statement metadata for broad communities of stakeholders and scientists).
This the point where Gail expressed that points 1 to 5 of the draft Principle 5 had gone “too far” in their suggestions, and offered me, in a last minute (Friday early morning) re-thinking of it all, her “outline” (which what shared and distributed during the telco and now incorporated just after the beginning of Principle 5 of the draft text, under the heading “of “Gail´s Summary”).
As a summary, a) your point is well taken for Part 1 of issues on metadata of Principle 5; b) we would like to hear your opinion (of all yhe members of the group) on how far to go concerning the issue of metadata on rights-statements. On new metadata rights statements namespace and new URIs, …should we defer to ongoing initiatives, to a future RDA Working Group (or liason with other RDA groups working on metadata) or should we recommend one of existing ones in particular, or even “create” ourselves a new one?
Take care,
Enrique
________________________________________
De: jbminster=***@***.***-groups.org [jbminster=***@***.***-groups.org] En nombre de jbminster [***@***.***]
Enviado el: viernes, 03 de julio de 2015 19:25
Para: Simon Hodson; RDA/CODATA Legal Interoperability IG
CC: Jean-Bernard Minster
Asunto: Re: [rda-legalinterop-ig] Legal Interoperability: Notes from today’s call, Balance and…
Thanks Simon:
All:
The more I think about it, the more I feel that we might do well to adopt the strategy suggested by Gail, to treat data and metadata in parallel, with pretty much the same wording,
My reasoning is a bit alembicated, but I think it is something we need to think about:
We have agreed that at least from some datasets, removing any restriction on metadata is basically equivalent to removing all restrictions on the corresponding data.
Some data producers might take exception to that.
We argue that this applies to data that have been acquired, derived or otherwise produced under public funding.
I can see immediately that some inventive data producers who might want to appear to live by the Open Access rule book for publicly funded data, yet de facto restrict access, would construct the metadata so that a very small but absolutely critical portion is actually produced under private funding. They would release the bulk under some CC license, but the missing piece would be tightly controlled, and without that missing piece the metadata and the dataset would not be very usable.
This is a commonly used approach in some practitioners of Open Source software, who may be OK with distributing thousands of lines of code, but be uncomfortable with letting the whole package out in the wild. JPL and Caltech do that regularly (or at least did so that last time I had to face that issue) The entire software package, produced under, say, NASA funding, is freely available as open source, but a small routine in a critical library is produced under private funds, giving complete control to the distributor.
In any event, we should avoid writing principles and guidelines that might push data producers to be too inventive along these lines.
Cheers,
Bernard
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