[okfn-discuss] Modding CC-licenses for data

Fri Jun 22 11:50:48 UTC 2007

rob at robmyers.org wrote:
> Quoting Rufus Pollock <rufus.pollock at okfn.org>:
> 
>> What do people think of this? Also should we have advice on waiving
>> rights (e.g. by 'dedicating' to the public domain) for people who
>> simply want to make their work available without any restrictions?
> 
> One of the European CC licenses covers DB right IIRC, so is it worth 
> working with CC to see if this should be a general measure for the next 
> version of their licenses? I'm very wary of producing modded CC 

You're right there Rob, I think it is the Dutch CC license produced 
under the aegis of DB rights maestro Bernt Hugenholtz. We've already got 
something on that in the guide:

<http://okfn.org/wiki/OpenDataLicensing#head-93f44af60f2a4ab2054de205d05952b0be2a1def>

We should probably do more work here to extract the diffs the Dutch guys 
applied so that we can use on non-Dutch CC licenses.

> licenses. Proliferation is not good.

I agree though my understanding of CC's positions is that they don't CC 
licenses to be applied to data -- only to the copyrigtable elements of 
databases. In fact talks with John Willbanks at iCommons indicated that 
they may be planning a communique on this precise issue.

> The GPL-3 final draft contains this section:
> 
> ""Copyright" also means copyright-like laws that apply to other kinds of 
> works, such as semiconductor masks."
> 
> Could this be stretched to cover the DB right? Is it worth very quickly 
> trying to get the FSF to add DB right?

Might be an idea though there focus is very much on the computer 
(software/hardware) side of things. How do you suggest we go about 
raising this?

~rufus