Re: LOD Data Sets, Licensing, and AWS

Ian Davis wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 9:36 PM, Kingsley Idehen 
> <kidehen@openlinksw.com <mailto:kidehen@openlinksw.com>> wrote:
>
>     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.
>
>     Action items for all data set publishers:
>
>     1. Integrate your data set licensing into your data set (for LOD I
>     would expect CC-BY-SA to be the norm)
>
>
> Please do not use CC-BY-SA for LOD - it is not an appropriate licence 
> and it is making the problem worse. That licence uses copyright which 
> does not hold for factual information.
>
> Please use an Open Data Commons license or CC-0
>
> http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/
>
> http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC0
>
> If your dataset contains copyrighted material too (e.g. reviews) and 
> you hold the rights over that content then you should also apply a 
> standard copyright licence. So for completeness you need a licence for 
> your data and one for your content. If you use CC-0 you can apply it 
> to both at the same time. Obviously if you aren't the rightsholder 
> (e.g. it is scraped data/content from someone else) then you can't 
> just slap any licence you like on it - you have to abide by the 
> original rightsholder's wishes.
>
> Personally I would try and select a public domain waiver or 
> dedication, not one that requires attributon. The reason can be seen 
> at 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_license#UC_Berkeley_advertising_clause 
> where stacking of attributions becomes a huge burden. Having datasets 
> require attribution will negate one of the linked data web's greatest 
> strengths: the simplicity of remixing and reusing data.
Ian,

Using licensing to ensure the data providers URIs are always preserved 
delivers low cost and implicit attribution. This is what I believe 
CC-BY-SA delivers. There is nothing wrong with granular attribution if 
compliance is low cost. Personally, I think we are on the verge of an 
"Attribution Economy", and said economy will encourage contributions 
from a plethora of high quality data providers (esp. from the tradition 
media realm).

Anyway, each data set provider should pick the license that works for 
them :-)

>
> A group of us have submitted a tutorial on these issues for ISWC 2009, 
> hopefully it will get accepted because this is a really important area 
> of Linked Data that is poorly understood.
>  
>
>
>     2. Indicate license terms in the appropriate column at:
>     http://esw.w3.org/topic/DataSetRDFDumps
>
>     If licenses aren't clear I will have to exclude offending data
>     sets from the AWS publication effort.
>
>
> I completely support declaring what rights are asserted or waived for 
> a dataset, so please everyone help this effort.
>
> Ian


-- 


Regards,

Kingsley Idehen	      Weblog: http://www.openlinksw.com/blog/~kidehen
President & CEO 
OpenLink Software     Web: http://www.openlinksw.com

Received on Tuesday, 23 June 2009 22:12:20 UTC