Development of Creative Commons licenses

["Greg London" <email AT greglondon.com>]

> Creative Commons licenses are causing us a big problem.

yes, this is clearly starting off on the wrong foot.
I've read the thread and see this has been clarified,
but, hm, wow.

> We are creating a 100 million word corpus of American English texts
> http://AmericanNationalCorpus.org

>From that site:
:: By submitting this e-mail, I, _______________ (contributor's
:: name), hereby grant to the American National Corpus Consortium
:: (ANCC), a worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free license to use,
:: reformat, reproduce, and distribute

You should probably either clarify that you're not even
guaranteeing attribution, in which case, you're looking
for Public Domain works, or change this page to clarify
that you'll accept CC-BY works.

I have a document here
http://www.greglondon.com/bountyhunters/bountyhunters.htm
that is licensed CC-BY.
You can use it CC-BY if you wish.
No, you can't use it under a Public Domain license.

> The problem is, the "default" CC license most authors choose
> includes "share-alike" and  "non-commercial use".

Yes, well, they *could* have chosen All Rights Reserved.
That they released some rights to the public is usually
viewed as an act of generosity. Not generous enough for
some, though, I suppose.

> These two restrictions make it impossible for us to
> include the data in the ANC, since (a) the ANC is
> used by publishers of dictionaries and
> English-as-a-second-language texts, who use the
> corpus to search for linguistic patterns and word usages,
> which is therefore a commercial use;

Is data mining All Rights Reserved text, counting
occurrences of "none shall pass", and presenting that
number to someone, a copyright violation? I'm not
familiar with data mining as it intersects copyright.
I wouldn't be surprised if it is a violation,
just about everything is these days,
but it couldn't hurt to ask.

If you distribute the original texts then that's
clearly going to require a license, but I'm not
sure how it works for mined information like
text patterns.

> and (b) the viral "share-alike" restriction means we
> have to let anyone else use the materials under the
> same license, and this would violate our strict usage
> requirements for researchers and commercial enterprises.

So, you want folks to contribute their works
freely to you, and then you parse them and
pass those works to others under
"strict usage requirements", and you wonder
why folks aren't lining up to give you their
texts?

> No one actually reads the corpus

Well, that answers that question.
In that case, I think this is a data mining question,
and I'm not lawyerly enough to answer it.

> In any case, if anyone has thoughts on how to reach authors who might
> contribute material to the ANC, even if they do use the default CC
> license, we'd appreciate hearing them. We have an on-line mechanism
> for text contributions, with a license, etc. that makes contribution
> easy.

Generally, I'd say get people's interest by creating
some big, Free project that inspires them to give
some of their works. (Free as in speech, not free as in beer)

Since  your project isn't Free, I'm not sure what to
tell you. If the result was BY or SA or something,
you could probably advertise yourself along the lines
of a new wikipedia, but for linguistics research.

But since the question of where, if at all, "mining"
intersects "copyright" is still open, this may be a
non-issue.

Here lawyer lawyer lawyer....

-- 
Bounty Hunters: Metaphors for Fair IP laws
http://www.greglondon.com/bountyhunters/