While it is important to protect and provide access to valuable resources, the unprecedented availability of new tools that empower vast numbers of people to generate content means protection of our intellectual property is becoming a more prominent issue for everyone, not just businesses. Given the ease with which digital content can be copied and distributed, it is essential that content creators are able to protect their IP. 

More robust application of archiving principles, such as rights management, ensure that only authorised users have access to copyrighted material, publishers and content creators can maintain control over their intellectual property without preventing access to those who need it.

There Is No Silver Bullet 

Unfortunately, the foundations on which our collective application of copyright law to digital objects are built on assumptions made about physical materials. These paradigms are well-established and tested in practical reality, but do not always fit the inherently different characteristics of digital objects. As the Digital Curation Centre aptly summarises: 

"The legal framework for undertaking preservation work on digital material is not as well developed and good preservation practices are not always recognised, or allowed for, by existing provisions in current legislation."

- Digital Curation Centre, Legal Compliance

You can circumvent some of these challenges by collaborating closely with your depositor and/or the rights holder of the content to ensure that all parties are satisfied with your rights management strategy. Clearly this leaves a gap, however, in situations where either the rights of a given object are so confused as to be unworkable, or when close collaboration with a rights holder is not possible. 

Better To Not Preserve Than Risk Your Collections.

Ultimately, the only true remedy to these fuzzier situations is simply to not do it. If you are unable to approach the preservation of a given object with due respect to the rightsholder, it's almost always better to not preserve the object at all. Consider the worst case: if a rightsholder was to take action against your Archives for your rights management practices, like has occurred with the Internet Archive, the cost of damage control could easily interrupt your capability to maintain your collections at all. The DCC again concisely summarises this advice: 

"It is important that licensing issues, copyright and any other intellectual property rights in digital resources to be preserved, are clearly identified and access conditions agreed with the depositor and/or rights holders. If the legal ownership of these rights is unclear or excessively fragmented it may be impractical to preserve the materials and for users to access them. Rights management should therefore be addressed as part of collection development and accession procedures and be built in to institutional strategies for preservation."

- Digital Curation Centre, Legal Compliance

This highlights another essential axiom to proper rights management: 

Rights management should be built in to your collections from the ground up.

If you have already begun producing archival packages, it's may be too late. The only way to maintain compliant rights management policies is to start with compliant rights management policies. You should consult as many resources from your local Digital Archives best-practice authorities as possible to gain the deepest understanding of rights management you possibly can before constructing your system and building your collections, and always ensure you are maintaining an open and collaborative dialog with your depositors.