Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

On Monday 05 June 2006 06:01 pm, Nancy Ide wrote:
> 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.

Cool.
>
> To clarify:  our use is this: we gather texts, "annotate" them with
> linguistic information, and distribute them for use by mostly
> researchers,

To this point, I think you could use BY and BY-SA works so long as your stuff 
was BY-SA. (I think that is a slam dunk, but I may be missing something.)

> 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.

Does anyone see a problem of using any works that allow for copying and 
derivatives to this point?

> (2) looking 
> for patterns, like how many times is " could care less" used instead
> of "could not care less" in current usage. 

To this point?

> 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. 

To this point? That dictionary maker would not be copying anything at all yet 
would they?

> 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.

And is this too much use to be considered fair use?

So, can you subdivide your work according to license and only group like 
stuff 
together or mixable stuff together if you wish.

Then offer your parts under licenses that would be allowed in keeping with 
the 
original licenses.

Then take the various stats from the "parts" and work out melded stats from 
those stats?

I have not thought too deeply about the details obviously.

If you leave out the ND works, group the BY and BY-SA stuff together under 
BY-SA, group the BY-NC and BY-NC-SA stuff together under BY-NC-SA. Offer the 
first group under a BY-SA license, which you can sell. (Assuming your group 
can legally use NC works.) Offer the second group under a BY-NC-SA license 
and be careful not to run afoul of the NC issue. (Not something I would like 
to try, but it seems some universities think it is OK.)

Granted, that is perhaps more hoops to jump through than you might like, but 
it may work for you. (Again, IANAL.)

>
> > 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!

So, you do have different parts with different licenses... interesting. I am 
being lazy now... Can you provide links to your site where this is indicated 
and explained?
>
> > 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).

Just checked your site here:

http://americannationalcorpus.org/native-speaker.html

If Canadians do not qualify becuase of their usage of English spelling, that 
would leave out Bahamians like me as well. If things change on your end, let 
me know.
>
> > 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 still don't think it is that clear. Unless you are selling what you make. I 
am not sure I see how the examples you gave for commercial usage goes beyond 
fair use, especially for those just pointing out that one usage is more 
popular than another.
>
> > 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.

I gave some suggestions in another response. If you want to brainstorm more, 
let me know.
>
> > 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.

It can take some getting used to. I think it is good to have a thick sking 
and 
a hair trigger "forgiver" when online.
>
> Nancy Ide
>
> P.S. Hey Drew, my son's name is also Drew! Great name...

Well, I think it is a good one as well. I actually like to go by drew and not 
by Drew these days though. (It is a long story...)

all the best,

drew
-- 
http://www.ourmedia.org/node/145261
Record a song and you might win $1,000.00
http://www.ourmedia.org/user/17145