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cc-licenses - Re: [cc-licenses] Creative Commons licenses cause a problem

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Subject: Development of Creative Commons licenses

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  • From: Nancy Ide <ide AT cs.vassar.edu>
  • To: Discussion on the Creative Commons license drafts <cc-licenses AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [cc-licenses] Creative Commons licenses cause a problem
  • Date: Tue, 6 Jun 2006 10:03:25 -0400

Believe it or not, I missed most of the messages sent yesterday because they got filed in a "probable junk" folder...so only now do I see them.

On Jun 5, 2006, at 9:13 PM, drew Roberts wrote:
I then wonder if you could create an annotation of a text and only distribute
your annotation and not the underlying text. If you did this, would this be a
copyright violation? It might indeed be a derivative work, but there would be
nothing of the original work remaining. (Well, depending on what all is
entailed in an annotation.) Again, IANAL. I tend to have ay more questions
than answers.


We in fact do this--that is, distribute the annotations (with only links to the original data--none of the data itself) for free, no restrictions, on our website. That is to say, we will be doing so shortly. If you go to http://AmericanNationalCorpus.org and look under "coming soon" it explains it. As you will see, we also distribute frequency lists, bigrams, etc. freely that are also derived works.

Vis a vis putting something on our website about contributions: See also the main ANC page, under Become an ANC Author.

I take your point about perhaps modifying the agreement to allow for attribution--no problem, since we always include the author in the associated header for each text. We even collect demographics--and there, we give the author the option of providing his/her name to include, or saying something like "anonymous". That part isn't visible unless you sign up to contribute. We actually thought that authors would be more concerned to hide their identities than insist they were identified!

Now, answering later notes:

We have two licenses, an "open" license that applies to appropriately freely redistributable, which you can see at http:// projects.ldc.upenn.edu/ANC/ANC_SecondRelease_EndUserLicense_Open.htm

This strikes me as certainly within the spirit of BY-SA. Any text we took from the web would be under the open license. Does anyone have an opinion as to whether this license would be consistent with BY-SA?

We also have a "restricted license" that covers materials in the corpus contributed by publishers. This license is at http:// projects.ldc.upenn.edu/ANC/ ANC_SecondRelease_EndUserLicense_Restricted.html

However, commercial users have to use a third license listed at http://projects.ldc.upenn.edu/ANC/ (the ANCC Commercial License Agreement--it's a doc download), even for open texts, for some reason. IANAL either, so I have to rely on the UPenn team.

As to Terry's misconception that we are against share-alike, we are NOT at all against share-alike! We couldn't be more in favor. My only problem with it is that the UPenn lawyers say that we cannot use share-alike texts because of that third license. If it were up to us, we'd distribute the whole thing under a CC-like BY-SA license.

Also to Terry's statement that Google and others mine the web (BTW data mining is really something different, technically--it means getting new, non-explicit knowledge from existing data, not just gathering statistics, but this is a minor point)--see my earlier note. They--and anyone else--can do it with no problem because they do not redistribute the data.

The non-commercial part is still a mystery to me. The goal of our license is to restrict our commercial users (many of whom are publishers) from "re-publishing" any of the ANC materials and making a profit. That would certainly be ok with most authors, I think, so why could we not use NC texts? Publishers can, however, use the materials as a resource to develop dictionaries, reference books, and ESL texts. Under fair use, they can directly quote no more than about 250 contiguous words, but that is all--and they rarely if ever do in any event.

Finally, thanks for the suggestions on getting permissions. When we have the time and money to do something like that we may try it, as these are all good ideas. In the meantime, we are looking for a means to get to a lot of authors quickly and easily, and I had thought of putting something on the CC web site a long time ago. I wrote several notes to the CC folks and never received a reply. This would, however, be great if it could happen. Granted the materials would be skewed but we need a lot of texts of a lot of types, and we can get other, more traditional text types from publishers etc.

If you know of any way to get ahold of people at CC concerning the ANC and the possibility of putting something on their web site, do tell me. I imagine we would have to work out the degree to which our licenses are consistent with CC's, especially the Commercial License Agreement, so I'd like to get a grip on that issue first.

We even give our authors a cute little "ANC Author" logo to put on their web sites if they contribute ;)

Thanks again for your comments and insights, and apologies for my prior frontal attack...

Nancy Ide





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