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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Nancy Ide <ide AT cs.vassar.edu>
  • To: cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Creative Commons licenses cause a problem
  • Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2006 18:01:43 -0400

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.

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.

This is really unclear, and any help you could give is welcome. We are considering that maybe, we could use the "By/Attribution/Non- Commercial" stuff in the ANC, especially if we eliminate a chapter or two from any text we download. Consider the scenario outlined above-- is any of this in violation of the default CC license? We *re- distribute* the texts, but we do not *re-produce* the texts, and by the license any user has to sign with the Linguistic Data Consortium (http://ldc.upenn.edu), which distributes the ANC, no re-production is allowed. So, what do you think--can we use CC-default -licensed texts or not? I think this is a tricky question, one which I had hoped this forum could answer or at least address. Can you help?

If you could do your whole project under a copyleft plan, I would donate my
stuff if you wanted it.

We have different licenses for different parts of the corpus--our biggest problem being the ARR texts. Easily, your materials can be distributed under copyleft!

I am a copyleft fan. I can give you lots of my stuff under a BY-SA license if
it would help.

Anything helps! Please look under "Contributing" on our site and send us your stuff--assuming you are a native speaker of American English (see the ANC website for a definition).

I think you may want to give examples of such commercial by- products for the
ignorant among us like myself.

I tried to do that above. If you need more, let me know.

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.

Big question: where is "here" and what are the "relevant places"? I believe that if many authors knew why we want their texts for, and how we use them, they would be happy to contribute, but we have no idea where to go to solicit contributions. We have tried to advertise as contributing to the "definitive record of American english at the turn of the millennium", but we don't know where or to whom this should be advertised.

Thanks for your replies. I am not so sure the tone was called for wrt my
original posting though.

Again, apologies for the tone. I am new to this Internet discussion list game, and I felt somewhat attacked by some of the responses.

Nancy Ide

P.S. Hey Drew, my son's name is also Drew! Great name...





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