Re: Design issues 5-star data section tidy up

Hello Martin,

> requesting open licenses in the narrow sense basically means requesting the end of intellectual property on the Web.

Quite the opposite is true. Every license (whether open or not) is
necessarily based on intellectual property rights. So, using open
licenses in fact generally strengthens the legal force and
applicability of intellectual property right.

What the OKFN's open definition (OD)[1] does is standardizing
licensing in the sense that all licenses following the OD standard
might be combined and mixed as you would like to without resulting
legal discrepancies. The underlying aim is legal compatibility so that
you don't have to care about legal stuff at all when you combine data
or content from different sources. Thus, the open definition is
sometimes called a meta-license. IMO, "Open standards" are rightfully
the legal counterpart to the technical Linked Data best practices.
(Though these aren't solely technical because the used standards are
all in the public domain, otherwise something like the WWW and L(O)D
wouldn't be possible...)

> And yes, I agree with Christopher that the extreme notion of "open" is an ideology, not a technology. Being able to automate the evaluation of what you can do with the data is a technology. Requesting that all data must belong to everybody with no strings attached is ideology.

Nobody requests that "all data must belong to everybody with no
strings attached" - this is only when you want to get five stars. As I
understand it the open requirement is very much in line with the
history of the web as it evolves around open standards and was
established to share knowledge. One has to respect that. It's
compatibility (technical as well as legal) that matters, not ideology.

You could write a "commercial definition" to define licensing
standards for commercial data publishers to reach compatibility in the
world of commercial data providers and non-open licenses...

Adrian

[1] http://www.opendefinition.org/

2011/3/10 Martin Hepp <martin.hepp@ebusiness-unibw.org>:
> Hi Egon,
>
> for mashing / reusing data, you do NOT need widely open licenses; what you need are
> 1. STANDARDIZED licenses
> 2. that are identified by a URI so that you can simply evaluate what you are allowed to do with the data by simple URI comparison.
>
> Proprietary licenses are problematic, because you cannot automatically evaluate what you are allowed to do with the data; that's clear. But a standardized license that says
> - "caching forbidden" or
> - "all triples attached to a subject in this graph must be preserved when republishing parts of this dataset" or
> - "foaf:page and foaf:homepage links attached to entities must be displayed in all HTML renderings of the data"
>
> would not really impede the mashing and reuse of data.
>
> And yes, I agree with Christopher that the extreme notion of "open" is an ideology, not a technology. Being able to automate the evaluation of what you can do with the data is a technology. Requesting that all data must belong to everybody with no strings attached is ideology.
>
> A lot of relevant data represents (at least partly) copyrighted works, and requesting open licenses in the narrow sense basically means requesting the end of intellectual property on the Web.
>
> Again, URIs for standardized licenses would be sufficient, however narrow the licensing terms may be.
>
> Martin
>
>
> On Mar 10, 2011, at 8:48 AM, Egon Willighagen wrote:
>
>> Hi Christopher,
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 8:27 AM, Christopher Gutteridge
>> <cjg@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
>>> "Is that bad? For Linked Data to be useful, you need to be able to mix and
>>> share.". Sorry but that's simply not true. For it to be useful *to you*,
>>> perhaps, but (Closed) Linked Data still has massive value as a technology
>>> and not all data should or can be fully open!
>>
>> Data consumption is indeed a 'use' too. Like watching the Simpsons.
>> Sorry for being sloppy there. There most certainly is a place and use
>> for Linked (Closed) Data.
>>
>>> Linking and Openness are two unrelated, but great, things to do but you can
>>> do them independently. There is still value in data which is Linked but not
>>> entirely or even slightly open.
>>>
>>> Open is the gold standard, but it's not the only form of Linked Data.
>>
>> Indeed not. And apologies for implying that Linked Data is bad in
>> itself. It simply disallows certain important use cases, which is what
>> I wanted to say.
>>
>>> There's a massive value to companies to produce Linked Intranets which will
>>> link and use open data from outside, but certainly not be open.
>>
>> Linked Data often needs dedicated, often individual licensing to keep
>> things going. While inefficient, there is a valid choice.
>>
>>> At the heart of our university are lectures. From a Linked data perspective,
>>> these are a motherlode of linkage. A lecture is the nexus point joining: A
>>> room, eg. <http://id.southampton.ac.uk/room/59-1257> with a lecturer, eg.
>>> <http://id.ecs.soton.ac.uk/person/60> with a number of students, with the
>>> URI of a Module
>>> <http://data.southampton.ac.uk/module/COMP1004/2010-2011.html> and the
>>> specific instance of that module
>>> <http://id.southampton.ac.uk/module-instance/10622/2010-2011> and resources
>>> for that lecture <http://www.edshare.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/455> . However,
>>> unlike most of our other data, it would take a huge policy decision to make
>>> this information freely available, but I can still make it available in a
>>> closed form to a student or staff member, upon authentication, which means
>>> that they can still have it on an iphone app / google calendar etc.
>>
>> So, can a student actually start a cool webservice where students can
>> mashup their classes with FaceBook? They will be redistributing the
>> data. Are they allowed? Are they allowed to fix errors and share
>> those? Are they allowed to make some profit out of it, to pay for the
>> Amazon EC2 hosting? If your data is not Open, they cannot.
>>
>>> Linked is a technology.
>>> Open is an ideology.
>>
>> I do not think that is true. Instead, I see them as both technologies:
>> they are both inventions to make things possible.
>>
>>> Right now <http://id.southampton.ac.uk/dataset/eprints> is technically
>>> should get ZERO stars as it's very complex to work out what license we have
>>> the right to use.
>>
>> And why is that? It sounds to me this is because your upstream data
>> provider is zero star? Should a star-rating system fail (or ideals
>> change), because the UK law system is, umm, akward?
>>
>>> Some of the abstracts of papers may legally belong to
>>> publishers and it may be OK for us to publish and distribute tham as data,
>>> but not to grant licenses on something we don't own.
>>
>> Well, I'd be the last to say the current publishing practices are
>> technologically working efficiently :) I've ranted enough about that
>> in my blog.
>>
>>> This dataset is on two
>>> journeys, one ends with an open license (silver to gold), one with it
>>> getting fully linked into the data web (* to *****). They converge at the
>>> heady heights of 5 gold-star fully linked and open data.
>>
>> I fully understand how hard it is to not be able to join the party,
>> because your data providers are not cooperating, as they limit you
>> what to do with their data. But I feel bad about that deciding what
>> our ideals should be.
>>
>> Instead, I would suggest SOTON to split data sets, and makes parts of
>> it Open (those for which it can), and make the Closed bits separately
>> available as Closed. That way, you still get your FIVE stars.
>>
>> See, 'Open' is a technology: the fact that some closed data
>> "copylefts" the whole package doesn't sounds like an ideological, but
>> really a technological (legal) problem to me. But this can be simply
>> overcome to make them separately available, I think, just like Bio2RDF
>> and others do.
>>
>> Egon
>>
>> --
>> Dr E.L. Willighagen
>> Postdoctoral Researcher
>> Institutet för miljömedicin
>> Karolinska Institutet
>> Homepage: http://egonw.github.com/
>> LinkedIn: http://se.linkedin.com/in/egonw
>> Blog: http://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/
>> PubList: http://www.citeulike.org/user/egonw/tag/papers
>
>
>

Received on Thursday, 10 March 2011 14:15:50 UTC