The need to express the intellectual property rights of digital materials has focused on access and usage permissions which must be granted by the rights holder. A key set of permissions not acknowledged by these rights expressions is inherent in the legal copyright status of the item. Digital libraries can hold and provide access to many items for which copyright status is the sole governor of use. This article proposes a small set of descriptive data elements that should accompany digital materials to inform potential users of the copyright status of the item.