Re: New LOD ESW wikipage about Data Licensing

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" <vfaronov@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.
>
>

Received on Tuesday, 28 September 2010 17:56:16 UTC