Development of Creative Commons licenses

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

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