Development of Creative Commons licenses

[Terry Hancock <hancock AT anansispaceworks.com>]

Nancy Ide wrote:
> > 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. 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. That's not unusual, but
>  you'll be happy one day when your search engine actually returns
>  meaningful results.

No, I think I understand the kind of research you want to do quite well,
and as you yourself, point out, there are plenty of people who do this
research without running afoul of copyrights.  So what's the problem?

As for my "search engine" working -- I generally use Google, whose
research programs gather this exact same information without trying
to privatize people's data.

I have absolutely no problem with you taking CC-By-SA data and making
it available under CC-By-SA terms. They would permit everything you
are attempting to do, EXCEPT make it illegal to copy the data. Which
is PRECISELY the privilege you want.  Why are you exempt? What justifies
that asymmetry?

And again, if you are venting your ire here, why not on the much larger
community of ARR works?

It isn't CC or the free-culture or free-licensing communities you have an
issue with, it is the copyright law of the United States.  You apparently
feel that "fair use" is not broadly enough defined.  I'm not so sure about
that, but it's debatable, I agree.

One thing you should be seriously considering, is that if you choose
only CC-licensed or public domain data, you will be biasing your database
to the usage of the sub-cultures who use those licenses (not sure if
that's a bad thing, but I suspect it isn't something you'd like).

Cheers,
Terry


--
Terry Hancock (hancock AT AnansiSpaceworks.com)
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.AnansiSpaceworks.com