[od-discuss] Thoughts about the Machine Readable clause

Thu Aug 13 16:23:48 UTC 2015

>From the draft after our call:

1.3 (or 1.4 depending on order) Machine Readable:

"The work must be provided in a form readily processable by a computer
and where the individual elements of the work can be easily accessed and
modified."

My thought: I feel uncomfortable with having zero written guidance about
the interpretation of “individual elements”. What if we removed
“individual”? It seems excessive and redundant anyway…

--

>From the preamble: "The term work will be used to denote the item or
piece of knowledge being transferred."

I want something that clarifies the form of the work. Unfortunately, I
can't think of how to describe this well. Yes, I can write a blog post
on the topic, but to share my thoughts:

For example, for a sound recording recording, the "work" is the audio
recording itself surely. So, we don't say that the audio is non-open
just because they didn't provide the MIDI data or the text-files with
lyrics. But surely, the lyrics themselves cannot be restricted or that
would impede the openness of the audio even.

But a MIDI file is "open MIDI" while an Opus format audio output of the
performance of the MIDI data would be "open audio".

Similarly, an "open journal article" could be based on non-open data.

Perhaps the answer is to write the blog post and actually link to the
blog post from the OD preamble?

-- 
Aaron Wolf
co-founder, Snowdrift.coop
music teacher, wolftune.com