2009/10/1 Mr. Puneet Kishor <[email protected]>: > On Oct 1, 2009, at 8:19 AM, Mr. Puneet Kishor wrote: >> On Oct 1, 2009, at 7:59 AM, Jonathan Gray wrote: [...] >>> Would be great to have thoughts and opinions of people here! >> >> Give a person a hammer, and all data starts looking like an opportunity to >> get attribution. >> >> For ages now we have been creating knowledge in academia and giving it >> away, expecting, but not contractually requiring recognition. The norms of
There's also an awful lot of secrecy and data concealment :) >> our disciplines have ensured that ripping off someone else's work without >> giving due credit gets censure that is worse than any contractual penalty >> could ever be. Ask yourself -- what would you rather? loss of face or some >> penalty that your contract provides for? I think it depends: there are those, especially outside of academia, who may not care much about the "loss of face" >> Let's look at it another way -- if you have CC-BY data, and I take it but >> don't give you any attribution (because I am just a prick and don't want to >> give you attribution, and because norms wash off me like water off a duck), >> what is it exactly that you are going to do to me? Come after me with what? >> If your data are really worth any money, sure, bind it in a contract and >> wrap it in a license and track it with a beacon to make sure you get your >> pound of flesh. But otherwise, it is just pointless. Right, but by this logic it is not doing any harm either -- and the contract does at least provide a very clear statement of what the situation is. Furthermore it is not always impossible to enforce formally (though I would agree that in most cases it is not a good option ...) >> Let's not even get into the issue that contracts apply only between the >> two parties that agree to the contract. So, if you agree to the contract >> with the original data provider, and then give the data to me without any >> contract, heck, I am bound by no contract at all. Yes, this is a specific contract point -- however, in Australia, and many other jurisdictions, there are rights in the data which can be licensed (by the way in common-law jurisdictions CC "licenses" can arguably be construed as contracts ...) >> Isn't it just better to let the normative processes of our disciplines, >> our society and tradition, guide our actions? > > So, if not CC-BY for data then what? One could obviously use a data-specific license such as the Attribution-Sharealike Open Database License that Open Data Commons provide in addition to the PDDL: <http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/> However, this obviously includes SA in addition to attribution which is not what they want. Perhaps it would be worthwhile for Open Data Commons to produce an attribution license. > I should have mentioned that I am in the "use ccZero or PDDL waiver for > public data" camp. Licenses are more appropriate for creative content, and > contract useful when you actually want something in return *and* can enforce > a payback if you don't get the return. I'm not at all clear why data is different from content here, or more relevantly code (in general -- one could argue for a different approach in e.g. public science). Attribution and share-alike licensing seem to be fully accepted within the free/open code and content domains and I really don't see why the same is not true for data(bases). I won't go on much about this here as I have written about this quite a bit before :) e.g. <http://blog.okfn.org/2009/02/02/open-data-openness-and-licensing/> Regards, Rufus _______________________________________________ okfn-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/okfn-discuss
