How Copyright Nexus Started

Copyright Nexus has its roots in a practical problem that professionals in cultural heritage institutions face every day. How do you get from a copyright question to a reliable answer efficiently, accurately, and without a law degree?

The story begins at the Connecticut Digital Archive (CTDA), where Mike Kemezis worked under the direction of Greg Colati, then the Associate University Librarian. Greg wanted something akin to the Creative Commons license chooser, a clear and accessible instrument that guides any creator to the right license for their work. That vision set the project in motion.

The first tool Mike built was an HTML clickthrough website that translated the copyright decision flowcharts developed by the University of Minnesota and PA Digital into a linked series of web pages, walking users through the decision logic step by step. It was a working tool built for working professionals, and it did its job.

When Mike moved to CT Humanities, he wanted to rebuild it. The CTDA had migrated systems and taken the original tool offline, but the need had not gone away. Working to reconstruct the decision tree, he found himself thinking about the problem differently. A decision tree was useful but did not provide the depth needed for reliable guidance, and any version he built would likely need to be rebuilt again within a few years. There had to be a better way.

That question led to Copyright Nexus as it exists today. Rather than rebuilding a static decision tree, Mike set out to build something that could reason through copyright status dynamically, drawing on live renewal databases, biographical records, and a structured knowledge base grounded in established copyright law. The result is a platform designed to grow with the field rather than fall behind it.

The project that would become Copyright Nexus was initially developed during Mike's tenure at CT Humanities, whose support made that work possible.