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pcplantdb - [pcplantdb] Licenses explained

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  • From: Richard Morris <webmaster@pfaf.org>
  • To: pcplantdb@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Cc: Sjam1@tesco.net, Ken Fern <ken.fern@lineone.net>, Philip James <acousticthyme@phonecoop.coop>
  • Subject: [pcplantdb] Licenses explained
  • Date: Sat, 24 Jul 2004 11:22:07 +0100

I've now added DiscussionLicense page to the wiki text below.

Email CC'ed to Ken as license pfaf chooses has implications for pcplantdb.

http://www.ibiblio.org/ecolandtech/pcwiki/index.php/DiscussionLicense

Some of the license options are discussed here.

For the most part I'll stick to creative commons licenses
as they cover all the major options. Creative Commons is a farily new set of licenses which generally give more rights than standard copyright [http://creativecommons.org/] they all feature a human readable summary of the license, a legal document and machine readable versions which embeds data about the license in the files.

The below text is taken from the creative commons website
[http://creativecommons.org/learn/licenses/] and covered by
CC-BY license [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/]

!! Choosing a License

Offering your work under a Creative Commons license does not mean giving up your copyright. It means offering some of your rights to any taker, and only on certain conditions.

What conditions? Our site will let you mix and match such conditions from the list of options below. There are a total of eleven Creative Commons licenses to choose from.

Attribution. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give you credit.

Example: Jane publishes her photograph with an Attribution license, because she wants the world to use her pictures provided they give her credit. Bob finds her photograph online and wants to display it on the front page of his website. Bob puts Jane's picture on his site, and clearly indicates Jane's authorship.

Noncommercial. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for noncommercial purposes only.

Examples: Gus publishes his photograph with a Noncommercial license. Camille incorporates a piece of Gus's image into a collage poster. Camille is not allowed to sell her collage poster without Gus's permission.

No Derivative Works. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.

Example: Sara licenses a recording of her song with a No Derivative Works license. Joe would like to cut Sara's track and mix it with his own to produce an entirely new song. Joe cannot do this without Jane's permission (unless his song amounts to fair use).

Share Alike. You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.

Note: A license cannot feature both the Share Alike and No Derivative Works options. The Share Alike requirement applies only to derivative works.

Example: Gus's online photo is licensed under the Noncommercial and Share Alike terms. Camille is an amateur collage artist, and she takes Gus's photo and puts it into one of her collages. This Share Alike language requires Camille to make her collage available on a Noncommercial plus Share Alike license. It makes her offer her work back to the world on the same terms Gus gave her.

More examples are available on our examples page. Also note that every license carries with it a full set of other rights in addition to the allowances specifically made here.

!! Implications for pcplantdb

Atribution - basically means we have to record who has contributed.
Could become tricky if lots of people start contributing. How do we record who did what? An easy solution is to put a list of contributors at the end of each page.


No-Commercial - not a "free" license as we place a restriction on use. But it would restrict practices such as taking the dataset
and putting it on an advertising driven website.

If we do not go with NC then pfaf will very likely incorperate
additional data back into main pfaf dataset and distribute it on CD
for profit. Might actually prevent forking of dataset.

Share-Alike - derivative work must be under same license,
i.e. if we go with CC-BY-NC-SA then derivative work must be released under CC-BY-NC-SA. If we go with CC-BY-SA then derivative work much be CC-BY-SA. Can't really mix the two.

A lot has to do with how pfaf decide to release its dataset as
pcplantdb could be considered a derivative work and the CC-SA clause
means pcplantdb HAS to use the same license.

Rich

--
Plants for a Future: 7000 useful plants
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