[open-linguistics] CC licenses

Thu May 31 22:42:44 UTC 2012

On May 31, 2012, at 6:15 PM, Brian MacWhinney wrote:

> I was hoping that the notion of "share alike" might serve as a filter indicating that the commercial enterprise was 
> operating cooperatively and collegially.  Is that unrealistic?

I'm not sure, because the opinions on what it actually means vary. If I am not mistaken, Creative Commons is currently modifying, or at least clarifying, its definition as a result of this fuzziness.
> 
> It just seems to me that removal of the NC restriction would seriously change the nature of not only the way that
> contributors viewed their input to a collaborative research collection, but also of how the participants in the interactions viewed their contribution to the scientific enterprise.  If one can believe that the companies involved are themselves doing science, then most of that worry vanishes.  So, again, this is not about feeling bad that people are making money.  It is about hoping that they are willing to act as scientists and collaborators.

I don't know the nature of the problems of misrepresentations you cited in an earlier note, but it is not clear to me what you think a commercial user could do to your data that would violate the contributors' assumptions. Short of re-publishing the data as their own, it seems the most likely uses in any context are for internal research (which might lead to a product), or creation of derivative works such as lexicons that may be used in a product. Neither of these scenarios seems out of the range of things you might have originally had in mind (or am I wrong?), so what activities would be beyond what you could accept?

I guess I am trying to get you to identify specifically what you fear will happen if you eliminate NC and/or SA. That would help all of us to get a better idea of what the actual stakes are with these various licenses, which I think in many cases is rather vague in people's minds.

Nancy

> 
> -- Brian
> 
> On Jun 1, 2012, at 12:03 AM, Nancy Ide wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On May 31, 2012, at 5:58 PM, Brian MacWhinney wrote:
>>> 
>>> I am sure that the people who have contributed their corpora would have zero problem with CC-BY-SA.  
>> 
>> Let me chime in here and ask why you insist on SA vs. just CC-BY? Share-alike can be problematic for some (granted, mainly commercial users), so if you would be willing to eliminate the NC restriction, why continue to stick to SA?
>> 
>> 
>> 
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