Finally trying to implement PREMIS Rights here has raised all sorts of 
interesting questions. I wonder if others have encountered the same issues.

1. We very much miss having a generalizable way to link to documentation 
for the rightsBasis. There is a specialized way to link to a license; 
however there is no analogous way to link to a statute or to external 
copyright information. We would prefer a general rightsBasisDocumentation 
(or something like that) linking identifier with a type and value rather 
than specialized ones for each suggested rightsBasis value, both for 
simplicity of programming and to support rights basis values other than 
those suggested.

2.  The way I read PREMIS, there's no legitimate way to express a time 
period associated with a restriction, except in a backhanded kind of 
way.  termOfGrant is explicitly defined as "time period for the permissions 
granted." So if you want to express an embargo period, you must express it 
in terms of when the permission is granted, i.e. when the restriction does 
not apply. I know some PREMIS adopters are using termOfGrant to mean term 
of restriction, but this makes me uncomfortable, given the definition of 
the element.  Given that usage, if there are both term of grant and term of 
restrictions to be recorded, one would need to have separate rightsGranted 
statements, one for the act and one for the act with restriction, in order 
to associate the term dates appropriately.

3. The question has been raised here about the need to version rights 
information, i.e. if different statutes or licenses come govern an object 
over time, do we want to know which were in effect when? This is distinct 
from the dates associated with individual rights provisions.

4. Defining rightsGranted as "The action(s) that the granting agency has 
allowed the repository" makes it awkward to express restrictions where no 
right has in fact been granted. It ends up coming out as rightsGranted -- 
NOT.  Not sure what the correct approach is. For us, we need to think of it 
as a "right governed by the rightsBasis", or something like that.

We'd love to hear if others have run up against these issues, or if we're 
looking at it the wrong way.

Thanks,
--Robin


Robin Wendler
Harvard University Library
Office for Information Systems
90 Mt. Auburn St.
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
617-495-3724 (W)
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