Development of Creative Commons licenses

[drew Roberts <zotz AT 100jamz.com>]

On Monday 05 June 2006 03:43 pm, Nancy Ide wrote:
> > I either don't understand what you are doing, or how the CC
> > licenses could
> > cause you a problem.
>
> Apparently I have asked my question to the wrong group.

Perhaps, perhaps not, but I don't think you can properly draw that conclusion 
from my statement.

I can see from your total response that of the two option I outlined, it is 
the first which applies:

I don't understand what you are doing.
>
> > Are you talking all of those unmarked, but by default "all rights
> > reserved"
> > copyright texts out there in the wild?
>
> No, I am talking about texts on the web that are explicitly indicated
> to be reusable by others--mainly, these days, using CC licenses. All
> of those "all rights reserved" texts are completely out of the
> question for our purposes, as we cannot violate copyright laws since
> we re-distribute the texts.

See, this is clearing things up. That is why I asked the question.
>
> We love the CC "By" license, but the problem is that the CC makes it
> pretty clear that the "By/Attribute/non-commercial" license is the
> "right" one to use, and therefore very few authors use "By". 

Personally, I like BY-SA for my works and generally take the same issue with 
CC as they "seem" to promote NC too much for my liking.

> And for 
> the purposes it was intended to serve, "By/Attribute/non-commercial"
> may well be the right license. I am trying to make it clear that
> there is another purpose that the CC licenses do not address.
>
> > If you can use those withoug contacting the copyright holders for
> > permission,
> > as a fair use, I would think you could apply the same fair use no
> > matter what
> > the license. (I am not a lawyer and that is a guess.)
>
> Bad guess. Fair use, although not technically defined, is understood
> to cover no more than about 250 words.

I am not so sure it was a bad guess. Please note the "if." Since you indicate 
that you can't use "ARR" works under fair use then I would expect you also 
not to be able to use most CC works under fair use as well, but only under 
licensed use.
>
> Now, lots of people in our business do use web texts, all rights
> reserved or not, as a way to mine language data. Since they are not
> reproducing or redistributing the texts but just gathering statistics
> from them, they will never have a problem (this is what companies
> like Google, Microsoft etc. who have plenty of money to develop a
> corpus on their own do). In our case, we want a corpus we can add
> linguistic information to (like, the part of speech of each word,
> syntactic structure, etc.), is in American English, and is balanced
> for genre (that means different text types, like fiction vs.
> newspaper, etc.)--which web data randomly acquired definitely is not.
> And above all, we need to distribute it to other linguists who can
> use the information we have added to the data.
>
> We are actually trying to make the data as freely available as
> possible without infringing on anyone's rights. As I said, we have
> had several authors give permission to include their texts in the
> ANC--it is however impossible for us to contact every web author and
> ask for such permission. 

I chekc out your site and one thing you could do, no matter what CC chooses 
to 
do, is to post a request for donations of textx here and in other relevant 
places.

> We are very much in favor of copyleft, and 
> distribute all our software and other data via GNU licenses that way.

If you could do your whole project under a copyleft plan, I would donate my 
stuff if you wanted it. (I am from the Bahamas but got my BS in Florida.)

> We are primarily researchers and scholars, with a few publishing
> houses (mostly university presses) thrown in--who have, by the way,
> contributed lots of texts already but do not have genres like blogs
> and email--and we are all for sharing resources via copyleft as this
> is very much in the spirit of academic research. So once again, for
> those of you who didn't get it the first time, we do not have an
> issue with share-alike for the purposes CC authors use it now.

I am a copyleft fan. I can give you lots of my stuff under a BY-SA license if 
it would help.
>
> Our issue with CC is simply, why couldn't there be a license that
> allows for research use, along the lines I described? I.e., ability
> to re-distribute the text, with full restrictions on "re-publishing"
> all or part of it (except within fair use) in any other form except
> as a part of a research resource, and to use it for linguistics
> research (which may or may not--most of the time, not--result in a
> commercial by-product)?

I think you may want to give examples of such commercial by-products for the 
ignorant among us like myself.
>
> > If you were expecting the commons community to be just a bunch of
> > work "free for exploitation", then you have a serious misunderstanding
> > of the community.
>
> I was hoping (not expecting) that the commons community would be open
> to another type of use that they do not currently address. 

That one wan't me. I think that was Terry.

> I see, 
> however, that you are not, and furthermore that you in turn have a
> serious misunderstanding of the linguistics and computational
> linguistics communities and their research. 

I know I have that non-understanding. Once again, that is why I bothered to 
ask the questions.

> That's not unusual, but 
> you'll be happy one day when your search engine actually returns
> meaningful results.
>
> Nancy Ide
>
Thanks for your replies. I am not so sure the tone was called for wrt my 
original posting though.

all the best,

drew
-- 
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