RightsStatement

rightsStatement, often referenced through rightsstatements.org, is a standardized way for cultural heritage institutions to express the copyright status and reuse rights of digitized objects. It provides a concise, machine-actionable vocabulary that complements traditional licenses by describing what is known about the rights status rather than granting permissions.

The system is maintained by a consortium of libraries, archives, museums, and cultural institutions, coordinated with international bodies such as Europeana and IFLA. Each rights statement is identified by a stable, human-readable label and a corresponding machine-readable URI, allowing systems to interpret the rights information consistently across catalogs, portals, and aggregators. The statements are designed to be multilingual and are intended to work alongside other metadata standards, such as Dublin Core and IIIF, enabling interoperable rights metadata in discovery and reuse workflows.

In practice, a rightsStatement is attached to digital objects via metadata fields, typically pointing to a rights URI rather than embedding long text. This enables automated processing by search engines, discovery interfaces, and reuse services. It is important to note that a rights statement is not itself a license and does not grant permissions; it communicates the rights status and any usage limitations, while actual permissions must be obtained from rights holders when required.

The registry is periodically updated to reflect changes in copyright law and policy, and new statements may be added or deprecated as needed. rightsStatement aims to improve clarity, reduce ambiguity, and support lawful and responsible reuse of cultural heritage materials.