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

Sun Dec 19 23:00:18 UTC 2010

On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 10:29 PM, William Waites <ww at styx.org> wrote:

> (Writing very much in a personal capacity, explicitly *not*
> the position of OKF or anyone else).
>
> Everyone in the OKF writes for themselves (unless it's a cheque)...

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.
This is the key point. The problem is that others have already grabbed this
as their property. They may have no right but we have to have a mechanism
that contests this. In this area logical arguments don't work - the ground
is too shaky and lawyers aren't logicians.

*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.

Agreed - we are debating the mechanism

 Otherwise we will be encouraging people to take the open data and
add their special secret information to make proprietary data.

Possibly true, but probably they need no encouragement. In practice it's
highly unlikely that corporations will look at science data and say = "oh
good, it's now Open so we can start to possess it". They will have been
possessing it anyway. They occupy land that they think they can get away
with, not that can definitively be proved to be non-owned.

 Right now we are going to significant effort to separate what is open from
what is proprietary. Not using copyleft terms defeats the purpose.
I think we are going to have to consult Jordan soon...

P.

Cheers,
-w

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-- 
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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