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

Fri Mar 26 14:05:13 UTC 2010

Actually, getting a guide to how to get an organisation to decide would 
be a huge win.

John Mark Ockerbloom wrote:
> 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
>
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