In the e-commerce case, I assume that licensing will be
1. more relevant and
2. more difficult than in the current rather academic environments.
Two reasons:
1. Publishers of data will want to constrain the usage of their data.
For example, a retailer publishing highly granular product model data
in its web shop may not want you to harvest that data for a competing
web shop. Most shops have copyright notices on their Web pages, and i
would expect that by adding RDFa, you do not automatically waive the
copyright on those parts.
2. Publishers of data are often constrained by the copyright of
others. For example, many manufacturers grant retailers the right to
use images and marketing texts / datasheets within their own
promotional materials, including Web shops. But they do not grant them
the right to grant you a CC license on the images.
Even Google does not allow you to republish static screenshots taken
from Google Maps.
I assume that we will need special e-commerce licenses for linked
data, along the lines of "if you republish my data, you must always
show our transaction link, indicated via foaf:page, in any rendering
of the data".
It may be useless to discuss a complex legal issue here where most of
us, including me, are no legal experts, and mixing the technically
desirable with the legal frameworks in multiple countries may also not
be too productive. But at least in the case of Google, there were
court decisions on their right to index Web content, and the main
reason for tolerating the crawling was that via robots.txt, you could
tell Google very easily not to crawl their content.
Martin
On 28.09.2010, at 12:24, Hugh Glaser wrote:
Picking up a specific point
On 27/09/2010 21:37, "Vasiliy Faronov" <vfaro...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Marc,
It is the right of the data provider to determine what the data
may be
used for.
To an extent allowed by the copyright / database right law.
I would estimate for most datasets on the lod diagram you would
not be
allowed to do what you describe. Most have some 'by' restriction so
you would at least have to give credit to the providers of the
dataset
if you want to use it. Luckily this is a restriction pretty easy to
comply with.
I disagree.
If you think of the delivery of Linked Data as a consumer of linked
data
grabbing a few sources, meshing them up and republishing, perhaps.
But once you move onto the open web of linked data, the extent to
which you
would have to credit publishers is much more challenging.
Yes, I can provide a list of all the (hundreds of) sources I have ever
accessed by putting them on a page and giving out the URI, but that
certainly doesn't satisfy the spirit of "by".
I simply cannot track every triple that has influenced every inferred
triple, plus contributed to the added value I give the data by
constructing
new knowledge using external processing.
If your estimate is correct, then basically Google would be illegal,
I figure. They gather data from the Web (even store it, which my
hypothetical app doesn't), process it, and display it to the user in
some form. They don't give any special credit, save for the links
themselves.
I think the Google thing is a good analogy/parallel.
If Google had to attribute every page that influenced the page rank
value,
or even the ordering and choice of pages, it would essentially have to
attribute the entire web.
RSS aggregators would be illegal, for the same reasons.
I believe this issue needs clarification. Licensing is a serious
issue,
but I don't think we can make it a "must have" for proper LD serving.
Imagine a "normal" web developer cautiously trying to add a bit of
RDFa
to their company's web site. Now we come along and tell them that
they
must also indicate a license. But they don't have a special license
for
their web content, as they have never needed it. Their reaction? They
just abandon LD altogether.
