Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

On Jun 5, 2006, at 6:15 PM, Peter Brink wrote:
> I really don't understand your problem. Why would your data-mining
> project violate anyones copyright? What is your infringement case,  
> that
> is how do you think you would violate the copyright of the works you
> gather statistics from?

This is the legal advice from the lawyers at the University of  
Pennsylvania's Linguistic Data Consortium, which distributes the ANC.  
We are re-distributing the texts, with restrictions for commercial  
users (see our licenses at http://www.ldc.upenn.edu/Projects/ANC/ ),  
and this apparently would violate the share-alike and non-commercial  
strictures. Share-alike says we have to allow them to re-distribute  
themselves, and we don't let commercial users do so (although  
research users can).

But I agree with you. What we do with the texts isn't going to  
violate any copyright laws *in spirit*, and if we went to court over  
it we may even win. But my guess is the UPenn lawyers want to avoid  
even the remote possibility of a lawsuit, whether or not we have a case.

What does this group think? By downloading a CC licensed text from  
the web, adding some linguistic info to it and re-distributing it for  
research use, with strong strictures on re-publication (e.g., putting  
a whole text out on the web again), do we violate the CC license? I  
would like to hear from someone who is from CC on this, because if it  
were felt we could use CC licensed texts that specify share-alike and  
non-commercial, we'd be in very good shape.

I think it is clear that what the CC licenses intend to say about use  
of the materials is that (a) if a text is re-distributed it has to be  
done under the same terms; and (b) there should be no commercial use  
of the materials, i.e., re-publishing them for profit etc. We are not  
doing that, but it is a gray area as to whether using the text to  
gather statistics about language use and then publishing a dictionary  
on that basis is a commercial use. Common sense says it is not a  
violation, but common sense and the law (especially in this new and  
murky area) are not always in synch.

Any thoughts on this issue would be welcome.

Thanks,
Nancy Ide