Open Access

Timm Lehmberg, Georg Rehm, Andreas Witt, Felix Zimmermann

• Comprehensive data repositories are an essential part of practically all research carried out in the digital humanities nowadays. For example, library science, literary studies, and computational and corpus linguistics strongly depend on online archives that are highly sustainable and that contain not only digitized texts but also audio and video data as well as additional information such as metadata and arbitrary annotations. Current Web technologies, especially those that are related to what is commonly referred to as the Web 2.0, provide a number of novel functions such as multiuser editing or the inclusion of third-party content and applications that are also highly attractive for research applications in the areas mentioned above. Hand in hand with this development goes a high degree of legal uncertainty. The special nature of the data entails that, in quite a few cases, there are multiple holders of personal rights (mostly copyright) to different layers of data that often have different origins. This article discusses the legal problems of multiple authorships in private, commercial, and research environments. We also introduce significant differences between European and U.S. law with regard to the handling of this kind of data for scientific purposes.