Richard said: I understand that Creative Commons declined to participate in drafting ODbL when invited. Why is that? Why the sudden interest in data now, after having declined the opportunity earlier? >>>>>>>>>
I don't speak for CC here, I speak for SC, which was far less integrated into CC than you might have imagined. It's why we eliminated the division and moved west. But we had our own Board, our own lawyers, our own staff, and we lived three time zones away from CC. And we didn't do a great job of being integrated.
As for SC, we were involved in the first go round of what became ODBL. We were able to convince all involved to write a public domain tool instead (PDDL) and then the SC protocol on data came out around the same time. CC also decided as a result, in part from what integration we did have between science and headquarters, to rebuild its public domain dedication as two tools - one a legal waiver (CC0) and one as a public domain "mark".
Here's some background that I am at liberty to share. I wasn't the only one working in and around here, so I am only going to talk about the stuff I was involved in.
First, there were differences in the European versions of the licenses that integrated database rights from other jurisdictions. After lengthy conversations in 2007 everyone agreed to turn those into waivers of the DB rights, so that if you use a jurisdiction specific EU 3.0 license, it should waive the DB rights. After that process, which was formally agreed to in 2007 at the Dubrovnik iSummit, we had to implement. That ate up a lot of what bandwidth we had for data rights.
Second, in late 2007, a key SC employee who would have been essential to any work on any ODBL became gravely ill and was basically out of action for six months. When that employee was finally back, we were way behind on day to day work and didn't have a ton of bandwidth for projects that weren't funded, like our biological materials transfer and patent licensing projects.
Third, after coming out with a strong statement against licensing data in the sciences, because our goal was interoperability, it would have been pretty hypocritical to then engage when people hired Jordan to start working on the revisions that became the ODBL (I believe that was actually OSM). I continue to think that the addition of a contract breaks interoperability - it certainly did so in the case of some core genomic databases - and that the creation and promotion of such a tool poses real risks in the sciences. I would rather work on getting OKF to discourage its use in the sciences, which is what Panton was all about for me. Panton basically says don't use licenses on publicly funded science data, including ODBL - or BY-SA.
So it's not like we have a "sudden interest" in data. CC's had an interest from day 1, from MusicBrains to Freebase to Encyclopedia of Life. SC's had an interest from day 1. It's just that to this community in particular we managed to conflate those interests.
It wasn't like we sat around and said hey, let's figure out ways not to work with the ODBL folks. We had very little time, lots of projects, not a lot of staff, and a lot of choices to make. We chose to put our time and effort at Science Commons elsewhere, and we weren't very well integrated with CC at that point either.
When I was in a previous job, I heard an aphorism that stuck with me. Never assume malice when you can assume conference calls. That about sums it up.
jtw -- John Wilbanks VP for Science Creative Commons web: http://creativecommons.org/science blog: http://scienceblogs.com/commonknowledge twitter: @wilbanks _______________________________________________ legal-talk mailing list legal-talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/legal-talk
