[cc-licenses] Creative Commons licenses cause a problem

Peter Brink peter.brink at brinkdata.se
Mon Jun 5 18:15:29 EDT 2006


Nancy Ide skrev:
> Ok, let me clarify. I appreciate Drew's note and apologize if I was  
> overly defensive--I think I was responding to the "tea-inspiring"  
> note from earlier today.
> 
> To clarify:  our use is this: we gather texts, "annotate" them with  
> linguistic information, and distribute them for use by mostly  
> researchers, but in a small number of cases, commercial enterprises,  
> which in turn consist mainly of publishers who are developing either  
> dictionaries or English-as-a-second language (ESL) texts. There are  
> two major uses: (1) use the texts to generate statistics about usage,  
> like, how many times a noun is followed by a verb, etc. (2) looking  
> for patterns, like how many times is " could care less" used instead  
> of "could not care less" in current usage. In case (1), the  
> researchers never even look at the text, they just generate  
> statistics from it. In case (2), most of the time a concordance,  
> consisting of a set of sentences, is looked at, say, to find all  
> occurrences of "could" followed within some number of words by  
> "care". The idea is to see how people use language. So, as an example  
> of a commercial use, a dictionary maker or an author an ESL textbook  
> might point out that "could care less" is more frequent than "could  
> not care less" in current usage. They might, in a rare instance, use  
> a sentence from one of the texts that was shown in the concordance to  
> use one of these constructions in their published text or dictionary.

I really don't understand your problem. Why would your data-mining 
project violate anyones copyright? What is your infringement case, that 
is how do you think you would violate the copyright of the works you 
gather statistics from?

/Peter Brink



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