[Corpora-List] license question

[Andy Roberts]

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