Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Nancy Ide <ide AT cs.vassar.edu>]

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...