[od-discuss] Open Government License - Surrey 2.0

Wed Mar 18 17:21:51 UTC 2015

[Hoping that I don't repeat previous discussion...]

On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 4:09 PM, Herb Lainchbury <herb at dynamic-solutions.com
> wrote:

> "I'm happy to do this if nobody else wishes to. I would need a contact."
>
> It believe we're all in agreement that this is not a conformance issue.
>
> It seems to me that insisting on clarification before a conformance test
> is going too far, when we're all in agreement that this is not a
> conformance issue.
>
> +1

>
> We haven't asked publishers to provide their interpretation of their own
> license before as far as I know.  Doing so would set a new precedent which
> I think is beyond the scope of conformance testing.
>
> I agree. Perhaps I am too "scientific" but I believe the licence should be
a standalone object which ultimately has to be interpreted in what its
says. On occasion a court may ask what was the intention of the legislator,
but that's up to the courts to decide. (I'd add that if we get into a lot
of this sort of detail it could be a significant amount of case-by-case
work).

>
> My preference is to provide helpful feedback to the license publisher
> *after* our conformance vote, letting them know about the interpretation
> issue.
>
>
> I think the key here is that Mike is highlighting something that the
> definition does not cover.  A licensors interpretation of a license they
> are using.  The Definition covers the license itself, and how that license
> is applied to a work, but not how a license is interpreted or perceived by
> a licensor. I can easily imagine a licensor mis-using any license, even
> Creative-Commons for example, and claiming that a consumer needs to pay an
> access fee or something even though that's not required by the license.
> That doesn't make the license not open, it just means the licensor has
> decided to use the license in a way that renders the work not open.
>

I think a court could be concerned with the intentions of the legislator
not with the interpretation of the licensor (except to moderate any
redress). Part of the problem here is that the licensor is also the creator
of the licence

>
>
> If we're going to introduce a new process where we ask license publishers
> for their interpretation of the license they are using then let's discuss
> how that should happen, and what we would do with the feedback.
>
>
> Even if we did ask Surrey for clarification.  What would we do with that
> feedback?  Would we judge the license as non-open?  On what basis?  We
> don't have a rule for that.
>
>
> IMHO, it's not appropriate to ask Surrey for clarification before
> assessment.  This would be a standard we've never held any other publisher
> to.
>

+1

>
> Having said that, I also don't want to rush the process.  We started this
> several months ago.  Surrey was very responsive to us in addressing our
> written concerns, and I thought we were ready to move forward.  That may
> have been an error in judgement on my part.
>
> So, if we're not ready to vote yet, I am fine with delaying.  Part of the
> consequence of vanity licenses is that they cause a lot of waste - for all
> parties.
>
>
I think we should try - somehow - to filter out vanity licences. Here I
think they are just that, but in the scholarly publishing we are also
seeing licence proliferation which is (I think) designed to cause confusion
an non-interoperability. Most of these are not Open, but they are marketed
as being beneficial to consumers/ purchasers, when actually they are badly
written and could by replaced by CC licences.

> I think going through this process has been useful nonetheless.
>
>
Yes

>
>
>
-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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