[open-linguistics] What to do about CC-NC and CC-ND in the LLOD cloud ? [was: Proprietary licenses in Creative Commons 4.0]

Tue Aug 28 10:12:17 UTC 2012

> very good point.
> There a number of points which come into play with linguistic data. Next to
> copyright in the narrow sense, there are privacy issues. Audio, and
> especially video, are sensitive to privacy issues. Speakers (including
> myself) may have all kinds of reservations against general availability of
> their audio and video data. NC nor ND might mitigate this.
>
> Furthermore, there are cultural sensitivities against 'Western Imperialism'
> in a number of non-Western countries. Totally free availability of these
> resources to Disney and other major entertainment players is seen very
> critical.
>
> Finally, in a number of cultures, there are taboos against mentioning the
> dead. This is about mentioning the names. Seeing a video of them is
> obviously a much stronger violation. It is sometimes possible to convince
> people to release the data, but a really free license is out of reach.
>
> To sum up, there are a number of domains where more restrictive licenses may
> be warranted. In my view, the LLOD should not exclude those domains.

Actually, for this type of data, the resource-splitting/standoff
approach would be applicable, as well: If annotations or
transcriptions (or uncritical parts of them) are published under an
open license and only link to a more restrictively licensed primary
data (audio, video, whatever), we can always include the free part in
the LLOD cloud, regardless how strict the license conditions we decide
for in the end are.

I see three basic options to deal with the situation:
- [open and self-contained] enforce open licenses and require
resources to be "complete"
- [open, but not necessarily self-contained] encorce open licenses,
but include resources with a substantial free component (e.g., the
annotations or other linguistic information about restrictively
licenses primary data), then, only the open part is actually part of
the LLOD cloud, but it contains links to restrictively licensed
resources
- [allow ND and/or NC, but require self-contained resources]

I think there are good reasons not to insist on open and complete
resources, but all of these options have advantages and disadvantages.
My personal preference right now would go in the direction of the
second option, but I also see reasons why people could prefer one of
the other possibilities. Much of this depends on the use-case at hand,
so we should keep on collecting people's ideas and impressions. I have
the feeling that we should discus this a little bit further for a few
months, as we occassionally did the last two years, and collect
arguments and counterarguments for and against one position or the
other, and then vote, e.g., via a doodle poll.

All the best,
Christian