[Corpora-List] Licensing output of a GPL'd morphological analyser

[Jimmy O'Regan]

2010/1/15 Francis Tyers <ftyers at prompsit.com>:
> El dv 15 de 01 de 2010 a les 14:42 +0000, en/na Jimmy O'Regan va
> escriure:
>> 2010/1/15 Adam Radziszewski <kocikikut at gmail.com>:
>> > Dear corpora users,
>> > we've got a formal problem with understanding of GPL licences when
>> > applied to a morphological analyser and its output. I'm sure someone
>> > before has dealt with a similar issue (and this may be of interest to
>> > others as well), so I'm asking for help here.
>> >
>> > Let's assume a morphological analyser is released under GPL. It
>> > consists of an extensive lexicon (which in binary form is compiled to
>> > a transducer) and the actual source code of the transducer and some
>> > interface. The analyser reads plain text, tokenises it and outputs a
>> > sequence of tokens with sets of tags attached (each word is assigned
>> > its entry from the underlying lexicon).
>> >
>> > The problem is: does the licence require that a corpus which is
>> > obtained by running the analyser must be released under a similar
>> > licence as well?
>> >
>> > Why yes: source code is "the preferred form of the work for making
>> > modifications to it [a work]" (www.gnu.org), thus in case of such an
>> > analyser, it should include the lexicon as well. What the analyser
>> > actually does is to systematically dump parts of its lexicon (thus its
>> > source code) and attach them to output. So the resulting corpus
>> > actually contains parts of the source code of the analyser.
>> >
>> > Why no: this situation resembles using the GNU compiler. When
>> > compiling some code, gcc outputs some parts of its components to
>> > generate the resulting object/binary. Yet nobody claims that any
>> > output of gcc automatically becomes GPL'd.
>
> Would the opposite be true ? Taking a non-free morphological analyser,
> and running a corpus through it and publishing the results as GPL ?
> Would that be "legal" ?
>
> Fran (NAL)

Maybe :)

In all likelihood, yes, but - IANAL, TINLA - ask a real lawyer, who
practices in your jurisdiction. Copyrights vary greatly from place to
place - as a simplistic rule of thumb, in the US you can't have a
copyright on the result of a purely mechanical process, whereas in the
UK there's a 'sweat of the brow' principle, in Ireland you can
copyright the output of a computer program, but only for 15 years,
etc. A lot would also depend on whether or not EULAs are enforceable
where you are and if that's specifically prohibited, etc.

-- 
<Leftmost> jimregan, that's because deep inside you, you are evil.
<Leftmost> Also not-so-deep inside you.

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