We’re here at the MIT Knight Civic Media Conference, where Alberto Ibarguen and John Bracken have just announced the winners of the latest news challenge, which asked the question “How can we strengthen the Internet for free expression and innovation?” Sands Fish and I were there to liveblog the presentation of grantees.

Getting It Right on Rights, a project by the @Digital Public Library of America, is working to create a more coherent rights structure for content rights, a single point of global rights information to make more content available to the public (Dan Cohen,Emily Gore).

Dan Cohen gets on stage to remind us that although we’re at the 20th anniversary of the web, there were forms of human expression before this. The web has seen an incredible flourishing of human expression. DPLA hopes to bring it online to help it intermingle historical content with the vibrant creativity of our time. Some of this content is held in places like the New York Public Library. They hope to bring these materials online and make them accessible.

They ran into a problem that is constricting their goals. 26,000 different rights statements attached to items in the library. Creative Commons licenses are available only on a very small minority of content. Many institutions don’t know if their content can be put online. There is a giant sea of material that we simply don’t know about.

The DPLA is going to streamline the complexities of global rights into a single streamlined expression of digital rights. This simple single point of information can be used by students to create reports, by app-makers, and even Twitter accounts like @HistoricalCats. DPLA’s sister project, Europeana, have identified 300 million potential items, 30 million of which are digitized, and 9 million of which are available.

The US likely has a billion items, from small historical collections in local libraries to the large collections of city archives. DPLA is spreading across the US to assign openly available rights to as best they can, so that the full range of human expression can be put online and available to everyone.