[Corpora-List] Legal aspects of compiling corpora

Wed Jun 18 13:21:36 UTC 2003

At Sunday 15/06/2003 10:20(), Mark Sanderson wrote:
>I think the problem though is that as great as ELRA and LDC are, I don't
>see how these agencies are going to help researchers who want access to
>very large corpora: Google has something like 30 terabytes of text. One
>can access it through their API, but some researchers may wish to have
>better quality access to such amounts data. The only way I think this can
>be done is to have researchers build their own Web collection, which does
>take on potential legal problems, but I don't see an alternative, if one
>wishes to access very large corpora.

then we will face another problem of comparing approaches and techniques,
if each of us use different corpora (without any possibility to share it
with others because of the legal aspects) then no comparison will be possible.

I am sure ELRA and LDC would be happy to launch a terabyte corpus project
and gather the pieces that researchers get from various providers and
negotiate with those. In some cases owners are very cooperative (for
instance the European office of publications, many newspapers, united
nations, UNESCO, etc.). Some of these own gigabytes of data and may be with
100-200 providers we can get the Tera (and increase this over time).

If the community feels this is what should be done I can bring this up to
ELRA and LDC boards and see how we can get funding for it.
All the best
Khalid Choukri

>I had some involvement in pulling together the 10Gb corpus for TREC a few
>years ago and one of the problems that seemed to be happening was that
>organisers were struggling to find owners of text who could could be
>negotiated with to provide us with enough text to build a multi-gigabyte
>corpus. When TREC wanted to go for bigger data sets, my impression is
>that, because of this problem, they had to move to the Web.
>
>At 09:37 15/06/03 +0200, Khalid CHOUKRI wrote:
>>Dear Colleagues
>>
>>I am not sure the way suggested by Adam is the right thing to do,
>>ELRA and LDC have been trying to negotiate such rights in order to
>>provide the users of corpora with good and legally-cleared resources and
>>we are happy to help request and get the authorizations to use the data
>>in a more sound and clean legal context.
>>
>>of course we can all do whatever we feel fair and then if no one sue us
>>it is fine but just imagine that after your 5 years work someone come
>>across your publication in which you refer to the data and managed to
>>prevent you from such reference/publication or even ask you to delete all
>>such data ..
>>
>>Best regards
>>Khalid CHOUKRI
>>European Language Resources Association
>>
>>
>>
>>At Friday 13/06/2003 15:36(), Adam Kilgarriff wrote:
>>>On the one hand, if your enemies are rich enough you'll lose.
>>>
>>>On the other you're probably less worth sueing than Google and they are
>>>still going strong (anyone out there from Google?  Your contribution
>>>most welcome), and it doesn't sound like you are doing anything with any
>>>salient legal difference.   (Getting authors' agreements takes huge
>>>amounts of resources and isn't feasible; listing references doesn't
>>>help.)
>>>
>>>People do get unhappy about their pictures and audio being grabbed from
>>>the web for use in other people's databases, and I have heard of cases
>>>of web developers having to rein in their ambitions because objections
>>>have been made.  As yet, mercifully, that hasn't happened with text -
>>>people don't seem alarmed at the idea that the text they publish on the
>>>web gets re-used.  Let's all pray it stays that way (though sooner or
>>>later we're bound to get chancers trying it on - can't help fearing the
>>>web is in its honeymoon phase, and the racketeers will mess it all up
>>>before too long).
>>>
>>>In the meantime - take courage! Do it!
>>>
>>>
>>>         Adam
>>>
>>>
>>>=======================
>>>Adam Kilgarriff
>>>Lexicography MasterClass Ltd:   http://www.lexmasterclass.com
>>>adam at lexmasterclass.com
>>>+44 (0)1273 705773
>>>      --and--
>>>ITRI, University of Brighton
>>>Lewes Road, Brighton BN2 0BL, UK
>>>http://www.itri.brighton.ac.uk/~Adam.Kilgarriff
>>>adam at itri.brighton.ac.uk
>>>+44 (0)1273 642919
>>>==============================
>>>World is crazier and more of it than we think,
>>>Incorrigibly plural
>>>                          ---'Snow', Louis MacNeice
>>>==============================
>>>
>>>
>>> > -----Original Message-----
>>> > From: owner-corpora at lists.uib.no [mailto:owner-corpora at lists.uib.no]
>>>On
>>> > Behalf Of delucca at nilc.icmc.usp.br
>>> > Sent: 13 June 2003 13:49
>>> > To: corpora at hd.uib.no
>>> > Subject: [Corpora-List] Legal aspects of compiling corpora
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > Dear Linguists and Lawyers,
>>> >
>>> > I am troubled with Legal aspects of corpora compiling. I am in
>>> > doubt if is an illegal procedure storage webpages (or part of them)
>>> > in a database (see at http://www.dictionarium.com/project.htm),
>>> > not available to public, and display its contents as short
>>>collocations
>>> > less than 100 characters by time by search method.
>>> >
>>> > On the other hand, the Internet search engines uses cached (temporary
>>>?)
>>> > copies of the sites and display a short of the web pages.
>>> >
>>> > My procedure is wrong? Which the Legal difference? I need ask
>>>permission
>>> > for each website to storage its pages? If I mention the source and the
>>> > author
>>> > I will be protecting the copyrights?
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > I look forward to hearing from you.
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > Yours Sincerely,
>>> >
>>> >
>>> > J. L. De Lucca
>>> >
>>> > -------------------------------------------------
>>> > This mail sent through IMP: http://horde.org/imp/
>>
>>*************************************************************
>>Khalid CHOUKRI  mailto:choukri at elda.fr
>>ELRA CEO
>>Tel. +33 1 43 13 33 33 - Fax. +33 1 43 13 33 30
>>Postal Mail: 55 Rue Brillat-Savarin, 75013 Paris France
>>Home page:  http://www.elda.fr/ or http://www.elra.info/
>>LREC News: http://www.lrec-conf.org/
>>***************************************************************

*************************************************************
Khalid CHOUKRI  mailto:choukri at elda.fr
ELRA CEO
Tel. +33 1 43 13 33 33 - Fax. +33 1 43 13 33 30
Postal Mail: 55 Rue Brillat-Savarin, 75013 Paris France
Home page:  http://www.elda.fr/ or http://www.elra.info/
LREC News: http://www.lrec-conf.org/
***************************************************************
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/corpora/attachments/20030618/bbe66aad/attachment.htm>