Information Gathering: License decisions

Hi SWEO,

Ivan Herman had worked on the licensing questions, and Rigo Wenning, a 
legal expert from W3C called me right now and we had a longer 
conversation on the topic.

It seems that the licensing questions is tightly related to our goals.
Our goals are somehow set by our manifesto:
"The Semantic Web Education and Outreach (SWEO) Interest Group has been 
established to develop strategies and materials to increase awareness 
among the Web community of the need and benefit for the Semantic Web, 
and educate the Web community regarding related solutions and technologies."

So I see that our consensus is that we want to aggregate information 
about the semantic web and publish it again under the least restrictive 
license we can get, to increase awareness of the topic.

To do this, we would need to decide on one license that fulfills this 
and publish our syndicated content using this licnese. We then require 
the authors of content we aggregate to state that their content can be 
used by us this way. Embedding the license info in the RDF data is a 
good thing we can reuse here.

I now propose for a vote and some feedback, to kickstart the discussion 
we have these options to choose from (plus more you suggest):
* all content is under no license whatsoever, people making portals have 
to validate the use of the data with the original authors

* we require from all authors that the syndicated feeds have to be using 
CreativeCommons-By-Attribution

* we require from all authors that the syndicated feeds have to be using 
W3C software license
http://www.w3.org/Consortium/Legal/2002/copyright-software-20021231


I would guess we can come to a quick conclusions, so please say your 
opinion fast and loud :-)

Additionally, I contact the authors what license they would choose.

I summed up more questions at the bottom of this page:
http://esw.w3.org/topic/SweoIG/TaskForces/InfoGathering/DataVocabulary

There is a balance between restricted and open licenses:
We need the agreement by the authors that their data is available under 
a license. But as more hurdles we put on adding content, the less 
content will come. But the content will be more valuable. So we have 
less sources, but assured that the license issue is solved.

It would be possible to tag each item with a license, and pass on the 
license with the item. But this would mean that the users of the 
syndicated data would have to check for each item. This would be 
complicated.

best
Leo

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DI Leo Sauermann       http://www.dfki.de/~sauermann 

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Received on Tuesday, 3 April 2007 10:36:00 UTC