[open-bibliography] Openbiblio Principles was: Virtual meeting today

[William Waites]

(Writing very much in a personal capacity, explicitly *not*
the position of OKF or anyone else).

* [2010-12-19 13:21:38 -0800] Karen Coyle <kcoyle at kcoyle.net> écrit:

] After all, if we've spent the entire document saying that  
] factual bib data is in the public domain, then there shouldn't be any  
] need for talk about licenses. I'm now quite confused about the overall  
] goals of this document.

Firstly I think the reason to talk about licenses is because some
places do not have a public domain as such, the best you can do is
release something under a license that confers the same rights that
people would have if there were a public domain.

That said, I would like to draw attention to the history of this
discourse in the free software world. Part of the root problem is the
ambiguity in the word free -- most languages have different words for
the concept of free of cost and freedom. In terms of free software it
has come to mean freedom in terms of the Four Freedoms of the Free
Software Definition, the intellectual ancestor of the Panton
Principles.

It has become the practice to refer to software whose license
incorporates a copyleft principle, that insists that derivatives must
also be free, as "free" and software that is otherwise free but
doesn't impose this requirement as "open". Until the legal loophole of
dual licensing was discovered free software was considered hostile to
venture capital investment and open software became popular in those
circles precisely because it was possible to make it proprietary.

The situation was then exascerbated by the Creative Commons promoting
intellectual property with a "chose what restrictions you wish to put
on your work" spectrum of licenses for creative works. Essentially
this popularised the restriction of others' rights where previously
only people with lawyers could do this. You could make analogy with
the state (police, military, etc.) previously being the ones entitled
to carry weapons whereas now the populace has been armed. Not
necessarily very helpful.

Now back to this thread. It is being advocated that bibliographic
information be released as if it were public domain information. The
subtle point being glossed over is that it isn't even clear that the
machinery of intellectual property can apply to this type of data (and
some pretty good arguments that it cannot) so by saying that it should
be public domain or equivalently licensed the point that it is subject
to the intellectual property regime is already being conceded.

*IF* this type of data can be intellectual property, and it should
somehow be considered part of the common stock of humanity, but work
has to be done to make it suitably available and useable, then it is
actually worth making some effort to make sure it stays that
way. Otherwise we will be encouraging people to take the open data and
add their special secret information to make proprietary data. Right
now we are going to significant effort to separate what is open from
what is proprietary. Not using copyleft terms defeats the purpose.

Cheers,
-w