[open-bibliography] BL data available under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

[Oliver Flimm]

Hi,

On Wed, Sep 01, 2010 at 04:28:13PM -0700, Jim Pitman wrote:
> Files are distributed under a 
> Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. 
> http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
> 
> This seems to me a reasonable choice for biblio metadata, and one there is
> some hope of getting big non-profit data providers to use.
> I dont see any significant downside to the "NonCommercial" feature, and
> "ShareAlike" seems OK too. 

hmm, when opening up our bibliographic data with hbz, we discussed possible
metadata licenses quite a lot. Rather quick it was apparent, that
except CC0 all CC-licenses had its problems - CC-A-NC-SA being the
worst of all.

Attribution means: When querying and combining thousands of
SPARQL-Endpoints to finally get *one* result item, then you have to
stick thousand attribution notices to the item, when showing it to the
end user. Not very practical...

Non commercial means: Wikipedia, Google and so on can't use it -
meaning less use and visibility

Share-alike means: The result of combinations of CC-*-SA and CC0 get
"poisoned" by SA, because parts that once were CC0 are now bound to
CC-*-SA.

Nevertheless the step of releasing the data is good news. But it would
be even better with a different type of license... Perhaps they'll
reconsider their choice at some point and change the license...

Regards,

O. Flimm

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