The National Digital Library of India (NDLI), partner in the rights statements consortium, has been working to promote the use of rights statements by cultural heritage institutions in India. As part of the efforts to raise awareness on the benefits of using standardised rights information, the NDLI and the Rightsstatements Consortium organised a national workshop from 6 to 9 September, led by Prof. Partha Pratim Das (NDLI), with Greg Cram (NYPL) and Paul Keller (Europeana) providing expertise on behalf of the RS.org consortium.

For many in the Indian cultural heritage sector, it was the first opportunity to learn about Rights Statements and ask about the value of making rights status determinations. The workshop also addressed the question of rights research and use of copyrighted works by cultural heritage institutions under exceptions and limitations.

Although the goal of the event was to increase the knowledge on the Rights Statements, determine if they would work within the Indian context, and understand why using standardized statements helps users, the workshop has also proven very useful to the Rights Statements Consortium. We now have a better understanding on how to support our members and those interested in implementing the rights statements.

The following report prepared by Greg Cram and Paul Keller provides a detailed look at the event and highlights the main outcomes.

Report from the workshop on the adoption of Rights Statements for digital libraries in India

By Greg Cram and Paul Keller. Photos by Shibabroto Banerjee. Flowchart by Paul Keller

From 6 to 9 September rightsstatements.org consortium partner National Digital Library of India (NDLI) organized a national workshop on the adoption of Rights Statements for digital libraries in India. The event took place on the campus of the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur in West Bengal where the main NDLI offices are located. The workshop consisted of two parts, an invitation only pre-workshop brainstorm followed by the actual workshop which was open to the public.

Pre-workshop brainstorm

The pre workshop brainstorming session brought together key individuals from the legal community, NDLI and selected GLAMs for an in-depth discussion in preparation of the actual workshop. After a welcome note by Prof. Partha Pratim Chakarabarti, there were introductory presentations by Prof. Partha Pratim Das (NDLI), Paul Keller and Greg Cram (rightsstatements.org). Paul Keller’s presentation focused on the history and details of the statements, while Greg Cram’s presentation focused primarily on the adoption at institutional and national levels. These presentations generated a lot of feedback, questions and discussion. The majority of these centered on issues related to the copyright status of works, exceptions and limitations in Indian law, and rights clearance.

In a subsequent presentation Prof. Prabuddha Ganguli & Prof. Shreya Matilal discussed the “Indian Copyrights Act: Overview & its Limitations in the Digital Era”. One part of this presentation focussed on copyright exceptions relevant for Libraries in India. The second part was an analysis of the applicability of the existing rights statements in the Indian context. The analysis concludes that the majority of the statements are applicable in India (the exception being the InC-OW-EU and the NoC-US statement). The remainder of the statements are compatible with the Indian copyright law, and could be adopted by the NDLI. The outcome of this analysis validates the design approach followed by rightsattenments.org: All generic (i.e non-jurisdiction specific) statements are likely to work in the Indian context.

After an additional presentation by the Registrar of Copyrights, Mr. Hoshiar Singh, the subsequent discussion again centered on a set of broader issues related to copyright, including rights clearance best practices, the rights status of metadata, the desirability of restrictive conditions when sharing works and the fitness for purpose of the Indian copyright law when it comes to digital activities of Libraries.

On the morning of the 2nd day of the pre-workshop brainstorm participants from the GLAM sector presented their activities online activities and addressed copyright related challenges they were facing. These presentations confirmed the initial impression that the application of the rights statements in the NDLI context cannot be seen separately from the wider issues related to copyright faced by cultural heritage institutions.

In the summary session Prof. Prabuddha Ganguli presented a plan forward. The key element of this is the creation of a copyright and digitization guide for libraries to be produced by the NDLI in collaboration with the Rajiv Gandhi School of Intellectual Property Law at IIT Kharagpur. This guide will focus on rights review, clearance and labeling and would identify best practices. Prof Ganguli proposed to have the guidelines validated by the Indian judiciary to give more certainty to the library community.

The following flowchart that was produced at the end of the session summarizes the general understanding of a combined rights clearance and rights labelling approach:

National Workshop

The public workshop on the afternoon of the 7th and on the 8th of September was the first opportunity for many attendees to learn about Rights Statements and ask questions about the value of making rights status determinations. Attendees of several cultural heritage organizations from across India joined the attendees of the pre-workshop brainstorming session. Students from the law school also sat in to listen to the conversation. After opening the meeting, Prof. Partha Pratim Das spelled out the objectives of the workshop. The stated goal was to learn more about Rights Statements, determine if they would work within the Indian context, and understand why using standardized statements helps users.

Profs. Prabuddha Ganguli and Shreya Matilal presented their findings on the Rights Statements and their fitment for purpose in India. After walking the attendees through some basic copyright fundamentals, there were many questions about copyright law generally. The volume and intensity of the questions underscored the need for simple, clear summaries of and best practices for copyright. There was a lot of interest in better understanding the exceptions and limitations in Indian law that cultural heritage organizations could rely on to make their collections more broadly available to the public.

Paul Keller and Greg Cram rehashed their presentation, incorporating feedback from the prior day’s performances.

On the second day, representatives from cultural heritage institutions shared information about their organization, their collection, and whether they would be willing to adopt adding a rights statement to their digitized objects. Most institutions expressed their intention to adopt rights labeling. Some institutions identified hurdles to adoption, such as training for those working on digital projects or lack of technical infrastructure to support a rights determination field.

Professors Ganguli and Das then discussed what the next steps were to be for NDLI and the participants. Professor Ganguli offered to create a handbook of copyright for librarians and archivists. In addition to the handbook, the professors suggested creating a set of regional meetings to spread the word about rightsstatements.org and the benefits to adoption.

Takeaways

When talking with participants after the session closed, it appeared their knowledge of copyright and the rights statements increased each day. There was excitement for the benefits that rights labeling present for users of cultural heritage institutions.

However, the implementation of the statements cannot be seen as a purely technical issue that can be addressed separately from rights evaluation. From the perspective of the GLAMs participating in the Workshop it seems that rights evaluation is a more ugent topic than rights labelling.

The discussions during both the workshop and the brainstorm were strikingly similar to discussions that have taken place at DPLA and Europeana at earlier stages of these projects. As with European and American cultural heritage institutions, Indian institutions expressed a need and desire for copyright education to provide the basis for adoption of right labeling.

Ariadna Matas, Junior Policy Advisor, Europeana Foundation

In 2019, institutions such as the National Library of Scotland launched their collections site using rights statements; libraries in the US tweeted about the rights statements and creating flow-charts on how to use them in their legislation to promote their use; the National Library of New Zealand joined the consortium and are contributing to the work around expressing indigenous culture and intellectual property; the Hindi translation of the rights statements (translation number 9!) was launched at an international symposium in Delhi.

2019 has been about consolidation. Our core actions have made the operation of the consortium stronger, and ready to take on new challenges. With the start of the new year, we take a look back at 2019 and tell you about the consortium’s achievements throughout the year and plans for 2020.

Implementations around the World

We are very happy to see the rights statements being adopted by more and more cultural heritage institutions, to address rights situations where standard tools and licences such as Creative Commons do not apply. Throughout 2019, a key motivator to drive forward adoption was the increase in development of new translations by motivated users. We count now 9 translations from the English version: Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Polish, Spanish, Hindi and Lithuanian.

The National Library of Scotland, the Carnegie Hall Archives, BAnQ, the Connecticut Digital Archive, the Museum of Australia and the Autonomous University of Barcelona are just a few examples of institutions that have adopted the statements in their repositories. We have also seen efforts to teach institutions how to use them in Lithuania, for instance.

More translations are underway, and with that, hopefully an intention to start using the statements in other regions and countries.

Progress as a Consortium

In order to better support the development and implementation of the statements, we also work to ensure the sustainability and efficiency of the consortium, and we are very proud of the progress we have made throughout 2019.

To start off with, there were a few changes in people; both Working Groups welcomed new members and said goodbye to a few. The Statements Working Group appointed Jessica Coates, Copyright Law and Policy Advisor for the Australian Library Copyright Committee (ALCC) as Vice Chair. Julia Fallon, Senior Policy Advisor for Europeana Foundation took over as Chair of the Consortium from Paul Keller. We would like to thank Paul, who will stay on the Steering Committee, for his steady hand guiding the consortium through the past two years!

By the end of 2019, we developed an approach to support members of the consortium with the process of adoption and implementation of the statements in their region - starting with running a workshop with the National Digital Library of India. This event gathered practitioners in the country, and with them, we assessed the suitability of rights statements in their legal framework, and approaches to start using them.

We also substantially improved the technical side of our translation process. We have started using an online tool, Transifex, which makes it easier to manage and maintain the statements as the number of languages increases.

Finally, we are paving the way for a more sustainable membership model for the consortium. This will make it easier for different types of institutions to have a place in the consortium, and will allow us to better support each other. With an important part of this work developed in 2019, we hope to finalize it early this year.

You can read our annual report to get the full picture of what we achieved in 2019.

Ambitions for 2020

We’ve got an interesting year ahead of us - we’ll be implementing a membership model, and with that refining what we can offer to members to support their adoption of the statements. We are also exploring ways to establish a practitioner’s forum to support our members, and surface some more of the great examples of how you can build resources to determine which statements to apply. We’ll be sharing more about this, and our plans for 2020 in the coming weeks.

Julia Fallon, Senior Policy Advisor, Europeana Foundation

2019 feels like a big year for our consortium. By the end of this year we will have been operating for three years thanks to an incredible amount of in kind support from our members and supporters. To continue the work that has been achieved in these past few years, we need to move beyond maintenance of the statements and our infrastructure.

Guided by our experiences so far, we know that we are not short of challenges to meet. However we also understand that despite good intentions in previous years, our own structures and resources cannot meet these ambitions. So we’ve scaled back and focused our priorities in 2019 on the most significant challenges for us to meet. Each challenge is led by a member of the consortium and we have set clearly defined targets to help us monitor and transparently demonstrate our progress towards these.

You can read the plan for 2019 here, and below find an update on our progress towards these objectives midway through the year.

1. Increasing the efficiency & effectiveness of the translation management process graphthinking GmbH were contracted to develop the translations management process and the publishing workflow for the website. As our existing maintenance partner, and a member of our technical working group they are ideally positioned to support this work. In the new process, translators will be able to edit the descriptions of rights statements in their language using a dedicated localization software (Transifex), which will automatically feed into our data infrastructure. The process is developed and is undergoing final tests before being rolled out to translation partners.

2. Improving the publishing workflow for rightsstatements.org Through the development contract with Graphthinking, we have started work to port the content of the righstatements.org website (including blog posts) into a more user-friendly Content Management System. Visitors to our website should start to notice our content is more to date over the coming months.

3. Prioritisation of member languages The French translation - developed between partners from Luxembourg, Canada and France - has been published and is available for cultural heritage institutions to apply. The next translations to be prioritised in the publication of Hindi, in support of NDLI’s planned implementation of the statements.

4. Exploring approaches to expressing indigenous cultural and intellectual property (ICIP) through the rights statements Trove has audited existing approaches to expressing ICIP considerations online. This includes the work undertaken by TK Labels, Local Context, Creative Commons and Murkutu. While there has been development of regional and national level statements, markers and protocols, there is no single overarching global indicator. This global statement is needed to maintain the different nuances of local, regional and national contexts while facilitating global interoperability and a shared global understanding. Stakeholders with an interest in this area, including representatives of First Nations communities, have been identified and avenues to identify funding options to support an in person meeting of stakeholders has been explored.

5. Developing an implementation package NDLI put themselves forward as a candidate to develop an implementation package, as they worked throughout their network to understand what they needed to do to use rights statements. To support this Greg Cram and Paul Keller will join Dr Partha Pratim Das and his NDLI colleagues in India in September to run a two day workshop supporting local institutions to understand, prepare for and apply the statements.

If you are interested to read more about the plans and activities of the working groups, you can read their individual work plans:

• Technical Working Group, work plan 2019
• Statements Working Group, work plan 2019

Adding to a growing suit of multilingual statements, our statements are now published in French and Polish and are available for everyone to use.

We’d like to thank our partners in Poland, and the tri-partite effort to develop the French translations by partners from Luxembourg, France and Canada. We’d also like to thank everyone else who contributed to these translations, through the development of them or the public consultation.

If you want to view the statements in any of the seven official languages, you can access them here. If your browser is set to a language that the statement has been translated into, you will automatically see the translation. If no translation has been published in the language of your browser, or your browser is set to English, you will automatically see the English language statements.

We are pleased to report that the volunteer community behind Wikidata - the freely licensed structured database of information, sister to Wikipedia, has recently approved the creation of a dedicated metadata Property for RightsStatements. P6426 to be precise. This will increase the chances that accurate, understandable, and precise rights-labelling information about cultural heritage works will be findable by end-users.

Here Liam Wyatt explains how this change came about, and what it means for cultural heritage organisations around the world who contribute items to Wikidata.

Liam is the Europeana Foundation’s Wikimedia community liaison, and was the world’s first “Wikipedian in Residence”.

Developing P6426 - a dedicated Rights Statement metadata property for Wikidata

Many followers of RightsStatements.org may be familiar with Wikidata. The six year old repository of metadata that is increasingly becoming a hub of structured information. Representing topics even more diverse than the famously wide-ranging Wikipedia, it currently contains more than 55 million Items, all CC0 licensed, and utilises more than 5,000 Properties to describe them - and is growing rapidly.

RightsStatement has now been added as a structured metadata concept in its own right. Consistent with the open-access and “anyone can edit” methodology, this addition was preceded by a proposal by a community member, the customary discussion process until consensus was reached, and a post on this blog responding to specific questions raised during the debate.

This means that for a Wikidata item which represents an individual creative work, it is now possible to make the claim, “RightsStatement status according to source website” alongside the relevant Statement, with a URL reference to the source.

For example, “Mining on traditional land”, a 2016 watercolour in the collection of the National Museum of Australia by Australian indigenous artist Mervyn Rubuntja, is accessible via Trove with the In Copyright (InC) statement. This is now also reflected on the painting’s Wikidata item (Q61639371).

Equally, “Aspects of Negro life”, a 1934 painting series by Aaron Douglas in the Schomburg Center in New York, is accessible via the DPLA with the No Copyright in the USA (NoC-US) statement. This is now visible on its Wikidata item (Q50086916).

Why adding RightsStatements.org as a property adds value to Wikidata

The particular value of this new Wikidata property from the perspective of the Cultural Heritage organisations using RightsStatements is that it is a record of what the institution itself declares about the works in its own collection - with a link back to that collection record. And, because the Rights Statements have already been imported as Wikidata items in their own right, they stand ready to be linked to Wikidata items representing the cultural heritage items.

As the nominator of this new Wikidata Property, Dominic Byrd-McDevitt - Wikimedian in Residence at the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and member of DPLA’s Rights Statements Working Group - said in his nomination statement:

Adding this property will allow us to add the correct Rights Statement to a work’s Wikidata item when the authoritative source (e.g. owning institution’s catalog record) has already tagged it as such. Many works which have rights statements have already been added to Wikidata…

Thanks to this information now being visible in Wikidata, it will be increasingly indexed and used by numerous third-party platforms, not the least of which is Google’s “knowledge graph”. This provides yet another argument for why institutions are encouraged to integrate standardised, machine-readable rights statements as part of their metadata.

By querying the dataset (tutorial) for the metadata relationships between these items, information that previously would have been extremely tedious to compile in raw information can be filtered and ranked immediately (examples). Wikidata aligns its items to numerous Authority Control systems - from global standards like VIAF to individual museum catalogue numbers - allowing readers to check that a concept in one database is referring to the same concept in a completely different service.

Separately to the RightsStatements property, Wikidata also recently created property 6216: “Copyright Status”. This allows for metadata describing the Public Domain date of a work (including different dates depending on jurisdiction) to be included. A example of this in use is item for the Dutch 1st edition publication of Anne Frank’s diary - “Het achterhuis”. This allows for a complex and contested copyright status to be modelled into machine-readable metadata.

Combined, the RightsStatement and Copyright status properties have greatly increased Wikidata’s ability to model complex copyright concepts and to propagate Cultural Heritage organisations’ metadata describing their own collections to the world. We look forward to working closely with Wikidata and its community to build an ongoing partnership.

Richard J. Urban, Ph.D., Digital Asset Manager & Strategist, Corning Museum Of Glass

The previous post discussed how the rights statements provided by RightsStatements.org may apply to different kinds of digital or original works. While these rights statements were designed primarily for use in the context of digitization of material culture (for example, Europeana and DPLA), this post outlines the complexities of the relationships between an original artifact and its digital surrogate.

In the Requirements for the Technical Infrastructure for Standardized International Rights Statements the RightsStatements.org Technical Working Group has outlined an answer to the question of what a rights statement is “about” by providing examples of how statements may be used within specific metadata standards. Each of these standards and best practices have different ways of resolving the “aboutness” of statements.

In order to provide a technical infrastructure for the rights statements, the Technical Working Group choose to model the statements as a Simple Knowledge Organization (SKOS) vocabulary. SKOS is commonly used for representing knowledge organization structures, such as thesauri, taxonomies, and subject headings. We felt that the purpose of the rights statements was to perform a similar function within the information systems provided by DPLA and Europeana. Just as the “subject” of a book requires analysis by a cataloger, we felt the myriad ways cultural heritage organizations expressed rights over cultural resources could be classified by a well organized vocabulary of terms. The purpose of the statements was not to provide a legally binding license. Rather, a rights statement represents a judgment about a complex and interwoven legal state-of-affairs in order to facilitate finding, identifying, and obtaining cultural resources online.

Further, our Technical Working Group has declared each rights statement to also be a kind of dcterms:RightsStatement. The Dublin Core Metadata Standard defines a rights statement as:

A statement about the intellectual property rights (IPR) held in or over a Resource, a legal document giving official permission to do something with a resource, or a statement about access rights.

However, this does not directly answer what a rights statement is about. If we understand metadata to make assertions about resources (“Anything can be a resource, including physical things, documents, abstract concepts…”), a property like dc:rights can be used to describe any identified resource. So for a simple Dublin Core example of an In Copyright resource:

Figure 1: The grammar of a Dublin Core rights statement.

It is the responsibility of your metadata model to define what kinds of resources an assertion may be about (in the context of the Resource Description Framework (RDF), this is called the “domain” of a metadata property) [1]

For example, both Europeana and DPLA use fairly general-purpose metadata properties for expressing rights (dc:rights or its specialization edm:rights, for more details see specifications of the Europeana Data Model and the DPLA Metadata Application Profile). Their metadata models allow many elements to be attributed to resources that represent the original work (edm:ProvidedCHO or dpla:SourceResource) or belong to the level of digital representations (edm:WebResource, ore:Aggregation). But when using a rights statement in the context of an Europeana Data Model (EDM) metadata, the edm:rights property expects the subject of an assertion to be an edm:WebResource or an Aggregation of such resources. In this context, the rights statement will thus always be about the rights status of a digital representation. (Because DPLA’s Metadata Application Profile is based on EDM, it also associates edm:rights with a edm:WebResource).

Figure 2: In Copyright rights statement classification of a Europeana WebResource.

However, just because this is a recommended practice for partners in DPLA and Europeana, does not mean that rights statements cannot be applied to other kinds of resources in the appropriate contexts. One of the use cases we are currently following is the use of rights statements within the Structured Data on Wikimedia Commons Project. Because technical documentation has focused on Europeana/DPLA use cases, there has been some confusion about the use of the statements provided by RightsStatements.org in other contexts [2] [3]. Discussion especially occurred in the context of a new Wikidata property for the domain of Creative Works that can be used to organize them with a Wikidata item for rights statements [4] [5] [6] (we will soon publish a blog post about that).

Figure 3: Wikimedia Commons/Wikidata example of rights statements for both original CreativeWorks and a digital surrogate.

Example

Aspects of Negro Life (Q50086916) → No Copyright - United States (Q47530911)

In this example the creative works are the murals currently held by The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. In the context of Wikimedia Commons metadata model, we could express a different assertion about the digital image that Depicts (P180) this creative work:

https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/634c59a4-6f99-3618-e040-e00a180633b0 → No Copyright - United States (Q47530911)

Although there is a relationship between the original creative work and the file that depicts it, the Depicts (P180) property is insufficient for us to infer any of the complex possibilities of how the copyright status of the original and the depiction are related. Because each assertion uses the Wikidata Rights Statements Status property to refer to a different entity (the creative work vs. its depiction in a digital file) it is possible to use the same kind of rights statement for both. This flexibility reinforces the need to handle rights statements with precision in the metadata about the source work and its digital surrogate. In particular, we call on implementers of RightsStatements.org to make sure that statements are used with metadata elements that clearly pertain to one of the levels of description (original object or digital representation). Again, here the name of a metadata element matters less than its usage with specific metadata resources.

One of the most frequently asked questions about the rightsstatements.org statements is if they apply to original works (i.e. a painting) or the digital objects (i.e. a specific digital representation of the painting in the form of an image file).

Our statements have been purposively designed so that they can be applied to digital objects to make it easier for users of the digital objects to determine the copyright and reuse status. This design process and principles are documented in the right statements white paper. The primary use case would be a cultural heritage institution that displays a rights statement next to a digital object on its website. In this scenario the statement indicates the copyright and reuse information of that digital object.

In addition most of our statements can also be used to indicate the copyright status of original works. For example a website may want to use the In Copyright statement to indicate that a book is in copyright without providing access to a specific digital representation of the book.

Most often the digital object and the original work will have the same copyright status. However it is worth worth bearing in mind the realities of the digitisation process. In many jurisdictions, additional copyrights, permissions and restrictions that affect the status of the digital object can be created during as a result of acquisition or the process of digitising an original work. As a matter of policy and practice we strongly believe that digitisation should not create a new layer of restrictions, and to the extent that restrictions are created, those should be waived. In situations where such additional rights or restrictions do exist, this should be reflected by rights statements that are applied at the level of the digital object.

This means that as our statements have been designed to reflect the status of a digital object, most of them can also be used to describe the copyright and status of the original work. We’ve broken this down along with some exceptions to this below.

Rights statements for in copyright objects

The following three statements refer to the copyright status of both the digital object and the original work:

• In Copyright
• In Copyright - EU Orphan Work
• In Copyright - Rights-holder(s) Unlocatable or Unidentifiable

The remaining two statements describe additional permissions on top of the copyright status, which apply only to the digital object.

• In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted
• In Copyright - Non-Commercial Use Permitted

As such, these statements can be used to indicate re-use conditions of digital objects but should not be used for original works (instead the Creative Commons licenses should be used for granting permissions to use copyrighted works).

Rights statements for objects that are not in copyright

In this category the No Copyright - United States refers to the copyright status of both the original work and its digital object. Unlike other statement in this category, no additional restrictions on reuse are expressed beyond its Public Domain status. It is also distinct because this public domain status depends on the physical location of the user of the digital object.

The remaining three statements indicate the status of the digital object only. Each of these statements identifies restrictions or explicit permission that are different from the original out of copyright work.

• No Copyright - Contractual Restrictions
• No Copyright - Non-Commercial Use
• No Copyright - Other Known Legal Restrictions

Other rights statements

All three statements in this category can be used for the original work and digital copies as the rights status is identical for both.

• Copyright Not Evaluated
• Copyright Undetermined
• No Known Copyright

In the new year we will publish a follow up post that will dive deeper into the technical details of how our statements can be applied to the different layers discussed in this post.

In June’s annual meeting of the steering committee, Paul Keller - on behalf of Europeana Foundation - was elected chair of the consortium. Paul is the Director of Dutch think tank Kennisland, and a member of the Europeana Foundation, and Network Association Governing Boards.

The renewal of consortium chair follows the departure of co-founder Jill Cousins. Paul is supported in his role by Vice-Chair, Caitlin Horrall of Library & Archives Canada.

We’d like to thank Jill - and fellow co-founder and ex-chair of the DPLA, Dan Cohen for their work in creating the vision for the consortium, and starting us on the path towards becoming a firmly established global standard in the cultural heritage sector.

In addition, in July Greg Cram was been elected co-chair of the Statements Working Group. Greg is the Associate Director of Copyright and Information Policy for the NYPL, involved in the development of the consortium since its inception and is a keen advocate for the take up on statements.

The position of co-chair of the Statement Working Group was previously held by Paul Keller, alongside current co-chair Emily Gore.

Welcome to the rightsstatements.org blog! We will use this blog to share information about the development of rightsstatements.org and about the resources that can help you implementing our rights statements.

We’re happy to start with the great news that the official translations of all 12 statements into German and Estonian are now published and available for everyone to use.

We’d like to thank Ellen Euler and Ilja Braun for being the first volunteer and working with us to develop the German translation, and Vahur Pruik and Tanel Pern for their work delivering the Estonian translation. We would also like to thank everyone else who contributed to these translations via the public review or otherwise.

Using the translated version of the statements don’t require any extra work. If your browser language is set to German or Estonian, you will automatically see the statements in your chosen language. Alternatively you can browse the German and Estonian pages.

Upcoming translations

We currently have Portuguese, Spanish, Finnish, Swedish, Finland Swedish and Polish translations of the statements underway. All official translations are undertaken by volunteers following our translations policy. Once an application has progressed through the quality control steps laid out in the policy, the translations are published on rightsstatements.org. If you are interested in providing an official translation, please contact us at [email protected].