[open-linguistics] Fair use (US) and CC-BY-NC

Mon Apr 17 07:44:28 UTC 2017

Dear Christian,

For the US case, you may want to read the article at Stanford on the 
four factors
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/

But yes, the EU also does acknowledge to some extent the "fair use", 
termed here "copyright exceptions". The EU Copyright directive gives 
some guidelines in Art. 5, basically imposing these three conditions for 
copyright exceptions to apply ("fair use"):

    (i) it covers only special cases (copies made for scientific
    research and teaching purposes; uses in educational institutions or
    quotation);
    (ii) it does not conflict with the normal exploitation of the work and;
    (iii) it does not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of
    the author.

The nuances and differences in the implementation of the Copyright 
directive by the different Member States is beautifully represented in 
this link:
http://copyrightexceptions.eu/

So, in my opinion, you only have to ask the question yourself whether 
the annotated's Bible editor will complain for its figure of sales to 
decrease. And in no case whatsoever, you can re-license a work that is 
not yours.

Indeed, this is only my opinion and I would be happy to hear a more 
qualified voice.

Regards,
Víctor

El 15/04/2017 a las 15:22, Christian Chiarcos escribió:
> Dear colleagues,
>
> a few years back, I compiled a massive corpus of Bibles and related texts
> in a CES-conformant XML format (following Resnik 1996), some also with
> annotations. For the most part, distributing this corpus would be illegal
> under European copyright law (and that's why you haven't heard about it),
> but I realized that there are circumstances which could allow
> dissemination of a great part of it under an academic license.
>
> Compiling and distributing a web corpus is basically illegal in Europe
> unless explicitly permitted by an accompanying license. However, US law
> has the concept of fair use, and if a data provider declares US
> legislation to apply (e.g., that "[t]hese Terms and Conditions ... are
> governed by the laws of the State of New York"), we Europeans can rely on
> the principle of fair use, as well.
>
> According to 17 U.S.C. § 107, "the fair use of a copyrighted work,
> including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any
> other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism,
> comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for 
> classroom
> use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright." The
> intended use is for NLP research, DH scholarship and classroom use, so
> that would probably not an issue -- and in fact, there is no financial
> damage whatsoever as this data is freely and redundantly available from
> the web.
>
> However, am I allowed to distribute this corpus with an explicit license
> statement? I think CC-BY-NC should protect the intellectual and 
> commercial
> interests of the creator of the electronic edition and be roughly in the
> spirit of an academic license, but of course, I'm not the actual owner of
> the data, but only responsible for its transformation and annotation. 
> I am
> wondering about the consequences if someone eventually creates an NLP 
> tool
> chain from this data and uses any models trained on the data in a
> commercial application. As the original copyright extends to derived
> works, this would be a clear violation of my license statement, of 
> course,
> but I would be responsible as I redistributed the data and by 
> transforming
> it from messy HTML to proper markup, I actually enabled this violation.
>
> Looking forward to your opinion ;)
>
> Best,
> Christian

-- 
Víctor Rodríguez-Doncel
D3205 - Ontology Engineering Group (OEG)
Departamento de Inteligencia Artificial
ETS de Ingenieros Informáticos
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

Campus de Montegancedo s/n
Boadilla del Monte-28660 Madrid, Spain
Tel. (+34) 91336 3753
Skype: vroddon3

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