Re: ANN: SKOS implementation of the ACM Communication Classification System

Hi Christoph,

Very happy to see more data appearing, congrats :)

A brief aside on licensing...

On 2 June 2011 09:27, Christoph Lange <ch.lange@jacobs-university.de> wrote:
> ...
> Note that we have not yet considered copyright issues -- but at least
> preserved the original ACM copyright statement, which permits "personal or
> classroom use".  That's probably not enough for reasonable Linked Data
> applications.  I would be glad if someone familiar with the subject could
> point out what to do.  What did previous publishers of RDF versions of the
> ACM CCS do?

I won't reproduce the text here, and I'm not a lawyer, but the wording
says "...to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to
lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request
permission to republish from..[address+email]".

I think one reasonable thing that someone may want to do is mirror the
data, e.g. to provide a public SPARQL endpoint or other services.
Currently it doesn't look like I can do that without contacting the
ACM directly, which I assume you've also done.

It's not clear to me whether I could even copy parts of the data and
index it to use in an application, as that potentially falls out side
of the personal and classroom use.

I fully support arguments to the effect of "use and seek forgiveness
later" when using data, but as we see more and more commercial usage
of Linked Data, I think we really need to see clearer licensing around
data. Otherwise feels like we're building on uncertain ground.

Cheers,

L.

-- 
Leigh Dodds
Programme Manager, Talis Platform
Mobile: 07850 928381
http://kasabi.com
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Received on Thursday, 2 June 2011 11:07:32 UTC