[Corpora-List] license question

[Andy Roberts]

Paul,

I don't have any personal experience of managing dual-licensed
resources, but I know there's nothing that could stop you offering your
lexicon in the fashion you describe.

There are many instances of this approach in the open source software
industry. A commcercial vendor will offer a software component under the
GPL to the open source community, and a commercial (non-GPL) license for
enterprises willing to cough up some money.

Many companies avoid including GPL'd software as it means that their
software must also be licensed under the GPL. This means there is a real
incentive for commercial companies to buy a license!

Regards,
Andy

On Mon, 21 Aug 2006, Rayson, Paul wrote:

> Hi,
>
> The "Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives" and "Attribution
> Non-commercial Share Alike" are suitable for non-commercial use:
>
> http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/meet-the-licenses
>
> Does anyone have any experience of using these CC types for academic
> licensees alongside commercial licences for non-academic licensees? I'm
> thinking, picking an example at random, of a creative commons licence
> for a semantic lexicon which academic users can use for free alongside
> something where commercial users come and talk to us separately for
> licensing.
>
> Regards,
> Paul.
>
> Dr. Paul Rayson
> Director of UCREL
> Computing Department, Infolab21, South Drive, Lancaster University,
> Lancaster, LA1 4WA, UK.
> Web: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/users/paul/
> Tel: +44 1524 510357 Fax: +44 1524 510492
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-corpora at lists.uib.no [mailto:owner-corpora at lists.uib.no] On
> Behalf Of Andy Roberts
> Sent: 18 August 2006 18:06
> To: Serge Sharoff
> Cc: Alexander Paile; lars.borin at svenska.gu.se; Corpora list
> Subject: RE: [Corpora-List] license question
>
> On Fri, 18 Aug 2006, Serge Sharoff wrote:
>
>> This is why I advocate the procedure of distributing an
>> Internet-derived corpus as a list of URLs.  The arguments in prior
>> cases against "deep linking" concerned situations with competing
>> services or mistaken identity.  These cases can't apply to corpus
>> distribution.  If the procedure for corpus compilation remains
>> constant, the resulting corpus recompiled on the target computer will
>> be almost the same as the original.  More information on the procedure
>> and tools is available from:
>> http://corpus.leeds.ac.uk/internet.html
>>
>
> This approach is obviously fine if your source is in fact the web.
> However, it's my impression here that Alexander acquired the resources
> via other means.
>
>>> Whilst you may argue that a license like LGPL would ensure that the
>>> corpus remained Free (that is, redistribution must stay under LGPL
> and
>>> any modifications, if distributed, must also be released under LGPL)
> is
>>> doesn't prevent people from either charging for the corpus or prevent
>>> its inclusion within a commercial product. This may not be acceptable
> to
>>> the copyright holder who originally intended their materials to be
> used
>>> within (not-for-profit?) research only.
>> However, can you solve this problem with an appropriate license
>> derived from http://creativecommons.org/ ?
>>
>
> Yes.
>
> The GPL and LGPL are licenses from the Free Software Foundation.
> Without going into a long license debate, the GPL licenses are aimed at
> software and it's all about the preservation of Free (not to be confused
> with free: no monetary charge) and Open code.
>
> There's nothing nothing in the GPL licenses that restricts the
> commercial use of GPL licensed code. That may not bother the OP in this
> instance, but I believe that the CreativeCommons licenses are still more
> suitable in this instance.  A CC Attribution Share Alike license is
> roughly equivalent to the LGPL, however, you could be more restrictive
> with CC specify a Non-commercial clause too. This restriction would be
> more appealing to copyright owners when handing over materials, I would
> have thought.
>
> Andy
>
>