"Rightsholders" and "Managing Organizations" on registry.paratext.org

Question

How does one edit the “Rightsholders” information on the list of projects on registry.paratext.org? I can add or remove Managing Organizations on a project which I am administrator of, but doing so does not change the Rightsholder data.

In general, if a translation is owned by a third party but permission is given for it to be shared on Paratext, who is the Managing Organization, and what name gets put down for Rightsholder? We have access to a translation in a local language which we use as a source text. The translator gave me permission to convert it to USFM and share it with our team, but I’m confused how that will continue to work when we upgrade to 8.

Answer 1

It seems to me that there is not automatic answer to “Who is the rightsholder(s)?” I would not expect Paratext to fill in the rightsholder information automatically in most cases. I would expect all the partnering organizations to make an agreement about copyrights that would be included in the project brief. If you think the registry is filling in either too much or not enough maybe you could make a feature request.

Comments

I agree, but it appears that the registry is somehow using “Managing Organization” to fill in “Rightholders” the first time, but later editing doesn’t change rightholders.

Does a feature request go to the same email address that requests for the main Paratext program do, or is there a separate web development team?

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Feature requests go to the same place. If you have the email address use that or go to the help menu and click on make feature request to start an email.

I did talk to some other and we think it is intentional that if you have credentials of an organization that has other copyfights, the registry makes the assumption that you will want to do so for this new project. If you edit the fields later it has no method to make a better guess than it did the first time. Are you expecting it to look at your login credentials and fill in you organization every time you edit the registry? I know the developers are trying to make the system as easy to use for the most people, but soon such small changes will have to go into the list for things to do later. But it doesn’t hurt to ask.

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My original question was based on the mistaken assumption that you can’t edit the Rightsholders field. I think assigning it automatically is great, and I now know you can change that if necessary by going to registry.paratext.org, clicking Edit on the project, and looking under the Publishing tab.

I’m still confused though why that field uses a set list of organizations and can’t be overridden. I understand that Paratext only works with certain organizations and therefore there is a list of Managing Organizations that you have to choose from. However, our team is managing the task of sharing a local translation owned by someone else on Paratext (with their permission). It seems like we should be able to put their name into the Rightsholder field.