[cc-licenses] Creative Commons licenses cause a problem
Nancy Ide
ide at cs.vassar.edu
Mon Jun 5 12:22:20 EDT 2006
Creative Commons licenses are causing us a big problem.
We are creating a 100 million word corpus of American English texts
produced since 1990 (the American National Corpus -- http://
AmericanNationalCorpus.org), intended to be comparable to the British
National Corpus of British English. We go to the web to find texts
that can be included in the corpus--especially fiction, but also
blogs and anything else we can find--often looking for Creative
Commons licensed material. The problem is, the "default" CC license
most authors choose includes "share-alike" and "non-commercial use".
These two restrictions make it impossible for us to include the data
in the ANC, since (a) the ANC is used by publishers of dictionaries
and English-as-a-second-language texts, who use the corpus to search
for linguistic patterns and word usages, which is therefore a
commercial use; and (b) the viral "share-alike" restriction means we
have to let anyone else use the materials under the same license, and
this would violate our strict usage requirements for researchers and
commercial enterprises. Attribution, the other part of the default CC
license, is not a problem for us, since information accompanying each
text identifies the author and source.
Our experience tells us that many authors would not only be willing
to contribute their texts to the ANC, but would be happy to know that
their prose is being used to develop the next generation of American
English dictionaries and other reference materials. Furthermore, by
far the largest body of users consists of linguists and computational
linguists, the latter of which use the ANC to gather statistics about
linguistic patterns. No one actually reads the corpus (most uses
involve concordances showing sentences in which a given word, phrase,
or linguistic construction appear), so there is nothing to lose in
any case. The worst that could happen is that a sentence from a text
might be used in a future dictionary as an example usage.
Creative Commons licenses clearly don't cover a situation where the
text may be used as a *research tool*, even if the goal is a
commercial product. In fact, the structure of your information
implicitly encourages the "attribution/share-alike/non-commercial"
license. Could there be a license or option that would provide for
use as a linguistic resource?
In any case, if anyone has thoughts on how to reach authors who might
contribute material to the ANC, even if they do use the default CC
license, we'd appreciate hearing them. We have an on-line mechanism
for text contributions, with a license, etc. that makes contribution
easy.
Nancy Ide
Technical Director, American National Corpus Project
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