[open-bibliography] WorldCat API and Licensing

[Tom Morris]

I can't help with the API, but I'll offer an opinion on the licensing.
 (Of course, you should should ask your lawyer if you want real
advice.)

On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 3:30 PM, Jim Pitman <pitman at stat.berkeley.edu> wrote:
>
> I notice WorldCat now tolerates Non-Commercial use of data obtained through this API.

A better way of stating this is that data obtained through the OCLC
API is restricted to Non-Commercial uses.  This means that you need to
pass that restriction on with any sublicensing (presuming they
actually allow sublicensing).

> Even if not ideal, this is way
> better than their draconian terms when I last looked a year or so back.
> NC seems adequate for my current purpose, which is the creation, maintenance and open publication on the
> web of comprehensive personal bibliographies. It a question for this group what license I could/should place on
> such biblios containing records derived by deduplication and enhancement of records from multiple sources
> including WorldCat, MathSciNet, ZMATH, ACM Guide, Microsoft Academic Search, Google Scholar, ....
> I am planning to apply CC0, and  to provide  comprehensive links back to whereever the data was derived from.

Your choice of licenses is restricted to those which cover the union
of all restrictions imposed by the upstream licenses.

CC0 is clearly not in that set.

This also means that you can't contribute that data to any other
database which doesn't impose non-commercial restrictions (e.g.
Wikipedia, Freebase, etc).

Remember that the OCLC is a monopoly run by executives with million
dollar compensation packages.  I would expect them to fight vigorously
to protect that monopoly, so I wouldn't mess around with this stuff.
Get a real lawyer's advice.

Tom