[Corpora-List] license question

[Rayson, Paul]

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