Rights Management Scenario

Built Content: Legacy Tobacco Documents (DRAFT)

Introduction

The Legacy Tobacco Documents collection contains 7 million documents related to advertising, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and scientific research of tobacco products that were produced during litigation against a number of tobacco companies. These documents - gathered by UCSF - are being submitted to the University of California Digital Preservation Repository for long term preservation.

Users and Uses

Preservation only.

The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL) maintains a separate website for accessing the document collection. In addition, a court order - the Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) - dictates that the tobacco companies involved must maintain a website at their own expense to make these documents available to the public.

Characteristics(features)

• All content from:
• Internal corporate tobacco company documents and memos
• Witness depositions and trial transcripts
• A court order (the MSA) dictates that all documents (including those produced in future civil actions) must be made available to the public
• No permissions obtained after content had been collected

Possible Problems

• Personal privacy issues - the documents may contain SSNs, full names, contact information, etc.
• Copyright status is a little unclear, given the disparate origins of the documents The documents were made publicly available by the MSA, which contains a clause excluding the publication of personal information
• Given the size and format (poor quality images) of the collection, it is not possible to examine the content of all documents for any information of a sensitive nature
• No assurances for content.
• Consent is “passive”.

Legal Issues

• The exposure of personal information  may infringe on privacy rights

Data Requirements Issues

Forthcoming

Records Management Issues

• Breaches in the security of the management system exposes UC to a myriad of legal problems (SB 1386)
• Future dissemination and publication of the objects (when retrieved from the repository) are problematic