Re: LOD Data Sets, Licensing, and AWS

Hi,

2009/6/23 Kingsley Idehen <kidehen@openlinksw.com>:
> All,
>
> As you may have noticed, AWS still haven't made the LOD cloud data sets  --
> that I submitted eons ago -- public. Basically, the hold-up comes down to
> discomfort with the lack of license clarity re. some of the data sets.

Yes, this is an issue that Amazon mentioned when I discussed mirroring
data from the Connected Commons with them a few months ago. Its a
reasonable concern as, being a large organization, they are the
obvious target for any potential lawsuit w.r.t. licensing or copyright
infringement. Other organizations may have similar concerns and we
need to anticipate that.

I'm glad that this issue is starting to get more attention, and
there's been some useful discussion so far. Licensing and rights
waivers, are topics that need to be addressed if we are to move
forward with building a sustainable infrastructure that can be
reliably and legally used for both commercial and non-commercial
usage.

As Ian mentioned, a tutorial proposal has been submitted to ISWC by
representatives of the Open Data Commons, Science Commons, and Talis
on precisely these topics, and will cover both legal and social
frameworks that relate to open data publishing. I hope that we'll also
be able to provide some clear advice on what is/isn't covered by
copyright and database licensing law to also ensure that people
scraping and converting facts from existing websites can have a
clearer understanding of what they legally can and can't do.

I think as the discussion proceeds we need to be clear about several
different issues: what mechanisms exist for waiving or granting
licenses to data and content and their applicability, and the social
norms that should underpin a community of "good data reusers";
attribution is one of these. At the moment many datasets are either
not explicitly licensed or incorrectly licensed, e.g. using a CC-By-SA
license for data. The latter typically expresses the wishes or
intentions of the data publisher ("please acknowledge my efforts") but
is not legally enforceable.

Cheers,

L.

-- 
Leigh Dodds
Programme Manager, Talis Platform
Talis
leigh.dodds@talis.com
http://www.talis.com

Received on Wednesday, 24 June 2009 08:05:17 UTC