[open-bibliography] Fwd: [okfn-discuss] University of Ghent LibraryCatalogues: Open or Not?

Fri Mar 26 13:27:14 UTC 2010

Rufus Pollock wrote:
> As I understand it, you are dealing with the licensing of what is in
> essence bibliographic metadata. As such my main recommendation is that
> you do pretty much what you were doing already :) That is you offer
> users the three main "open" license choices for data:
> 
> Public Domain: PDDL or CCZero
> Attribution: ODC-by - "http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/by/";
> Attribution-Sharealike: ODbL - "http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/";

Do the latter two ODC licenses purport to impose contract terms that go further
than copyright?  That's one problem I had with them as I understood them when
they were announced; I really don't like the principle that any download
or use of data binds me to requirements that copyright law itself does not.

I'm currently licensing my ~40,000 bibliographic records for free online books
with CC-BY-SA.  I realize that the SA requirements could be removed where
record data is reused under fair use and public domain provisions, and I'm fine
with that.  (For instance, at least some of the bibliographic fields
are very likely to be public domain by US standards.)  I wouldn't want to
switch to a similar ODC license that tried to include contractual
restrictions for uses that are currently permitted by our copyright law.

(Actually, I'm considering going to CC-0, which would simplify things
further, but how to get approval for that in my organization isn't
entirely clear.)

John Mark Ockerbloom