Development of Creative Commons licenses

[drew Roberts <zotz AT 100jamz.com>]

On Tuesday 06 June 2006 10:03 am, Nancy Ide wrote:
> 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. 

Can you give us a sample of what this would look like? (Preferably from a CC 
BY text and include a link to said BY text.) This would go a long way to 
helping out those of us with a large ignorance factor in your particular 
area.

> 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?

My take is that, unfortunately for you, only BY-SA is consistent with BY-SA. 
If you want to use BY-SA texts, without needing permission, you might want to 
see if you can release those parts of your work based on BY-SA works under a 
BY-SA license.
>
> 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.

This last part will be a no-go for BY-SA works.
>
> 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. 

I think they would be right, but why is the project married to 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.

See, here is where our ignorance, well, my ignorance at least, makes it hard 
to offer any real advice... What sort of data would you be re-distributing 
that would be copyright-violating data. from the response of others, there 
are some of us that can imagine data that we feel would not violate 
copyrights to distribute. So, without samples/examples, it is hard for us.
>
> The non-commercial part is still a mystery to me. The goal of our
> license is to restrict our commercial users 

I think the catch is that you would possibly be considered a commercial user. 
And you are,possibly,  (re)distributing the works or derivatives of the 
works.

> (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

all the best,

drew
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