ETANA will establish a robust system of rights management. Materials with questionable attribution will not be posted on the ETANA site. All contributing entities, both individual and organizational, will be required to submit either a clear statement of ownership or authorization for use from a copyright holder. Generally ETANA will expect to receive perpetual, non-exclusive rights to display and distribute worldwide any materials hosted on the ETANA site.
That said it is recognized that different segments of ETANA will need different rights management strategies. For example, the born digital publications disseminated by scholarly societies presumably will adhere to rights systems established by the societies in compliance with copyright and intellectual property law. Rights management guidelines, however, for international cultural materials submitted through the ATK by field archeologists' present a challenge that requires ETANA rights compliance with other nations' intellectual property law. A third type of materials such as the early core digitized texts offer an opportunity to generate revenue. In this case, ETANA's governing board may want to consider, for reasons described below, to charging usage fees in the form of site licenses, transaction charges, or subscriptions thereby requiring another level of rights management.
Regarding usage fees, an issue that will influence ETANA's rights management structure concerns ETANA's eventual economic model. Discussions among founding members reveal a tension between knowledge as a public good (the KEM model) and a competing pressure on libraries, universities, and scholarly societies to be entrepreneurial and to generate income. On one hand if recovering costs is unnecessary or unrealistic, ETANA will observe intellectual property/copyright law (require people to submit a rights form, post appropriate notices and guidelines, remain responsive to international copyright requirements). On the other hand if revenue must be generated in order to break even or to enhance ETANA services then ETANA's rights management system or at least a portion of it, whether directly administered or contracted to an intellectual rights agency, will evolve differently.
The only certainty for persons working with digital rights management is that the technology used to administer digital rights systems and rights law for digital materials are evolving. Fair use, the definition of a derivative work, observing intellectual property law in a networked world, the tension between cost recovery and information as public good, and the trade off between rights control and individual privacy are all issues that the ETANA community needs to explore. ETANA's board of directors will monitor the progress of relevant legislation and technological developments and work with scholars, publishers, and librarians to develop standards to serve the needs of the ancient Near Eastern studies community.