[Corpora-List] Copyright question again
Khalid Choukri
choukri at elda.org
Tue Jan 6 08:37:29 UTC 2015
Dear Damir, Colleagues
if I may put in my two cents (or my two euros!!) in this discussion
1) I assume that we have to interpret the previous message from a US
perspective; As you are in the US , the fair use is a very common
doctrine, unfortunately you can not use such arguments in a large number
of countries in particular in Europe; UK has moved recently to this
but not clear yet.
2) in fair use , the first of the four factors is *(1) the purpose and
character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial
nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes*; so for research and
educational purposes (including sharing data for research) I second
Orion arguments.
3) the common misinterpretation is "can you trace the sources of my
"list of words" or what ever "derived outcomes" from the copyrighted
data; my legal advisors insist often that in "Copyright infringement"
the key word is "Copy" , so as long as you copy data (that is what we do
when we crawl/harvest etc. you are already infringing the Copyright law.
But the other key word that my lawyers utter more often is "risk", what
is the risk (i.e. what would be the benefit for copyright owners to sue
you!!), I guess you are the only one who can assess this ; in Europe
everyone is trying to sue Google , Microsoft etc. !!
all the best
Khalid
On 2015-01-06 07:15, Orion Montoya wrote:
> Word lists and frequency profiles would seem to be safely in the realm
> of fair use: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use . The Google Books
> Ngrams data, distributed up to 12-grams by Google, are one example of
> people distributing rather high-N ngrams. Of course Google fought with
> the Authors Guild over Google Books in general, but I don't recall
> this distribution of ngram data being part of their fight, and in the
> end the Authors Guild didn't win the obscurity they were pleading for.
> For another example, http://commoncrawl.org/ distributes a massive
> crawl of the web for researchers (or anybody) which is far more
> wholesale copying+redistribution than you're proposing, but they
> follow the normal rules that webcrawlers follow and are doing just
> fine (and are a very useful resource!).
>
> So I would personally have zero legal worry about what you're
> proposing. I would have no qualms about either academic research or
> commercial applications (or commercial distribution) of that derived
> data. Adam is (as usual) right, that you shouldn't even ask anybody
> for permission.
>
> The thing about fair use that can make university lawyers
> uncomfortable is that it's an "affirmative defense" -- you can argue
> it in court if someone sues you, but there's no guarantee that you can
> use it to stay out of court in the first place, which can be expensive.
>
> But the other thing about the fair use defense is that, in order for
> you to use it, somebody needs to be able to claim that you're
> infringing their copyright in the first place. If you're just
> distributing frequency lists, there's no trace of a copyrighted work
> to be found; even at the 5-gram level, it's very hard to find any
> actionable infringement: the fourth principle to be considered in
> evaluating fair use is "the effect of the use upon the potential
> market for or value of the copyrighted work" and in your case that
> effect should be exactly nil.
>
> You could save yourself a bit of busywork, and maybe offer your
> university's lawyers some psychological insulation from legal risk, by
> using existing corpora resources like Common Crawl.
>
> Part C of your question --- "are there jurisdictions where this might
> be illegal" --- is the fuzziest to answer; the Berne Convention allows
> signatory countries to define fair use for themselves, so there might
> be jurisdictions where this could be risky, but they're probably
> places for which it's challenging to get a visa anyway. I am not a
> lawyer, just a copyright geek and a subscriber of "5 Useful Articles"
> by Parker Higgins & Sarah Jeong, http://tinyletter.com/5ua , an
> amusing and edifying weekly email about the inherent comedy of US IP
> law in the 21st century.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Orion
>
> On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 9:30 PM, Adam Kilgarriff
> <adam.kilgarriff at sketchengine.co.uk
> <mailto:adam.kilgarriff at sketchengine.co.uk>> wrote:
>
> Dear Damir,
>
> a few thoughts:
>
> In an innocent world view, the law says what is allowed and what
> is not. The more I see of how the legal profession works, the
> clearer it is that it's all political, in the sense that the
> judgements that build the case law (at least in UK) are made based
> on how well the lawyers played the game, how much money was
> involved, who had a sniff of how much money they might make.
>
> It's not about what is legal (which is always, in this area,
> underspecified), it is about risk management.
>
> If no-one sees a money-making opportunity, there is very little
> legal risk since no-one will take you to court.
> If you're a big organisation, you can always be taken to court and
> sued for large sums. This has had horrible consequences for the
> JISC group at ISPRA: they are part of the EU, a very large
> organisation, and have had their work restricted by
> ambulance-chasing lawyers with a glint in their eyes for winning
> plump settlements.
>
> What you might be willing to do personally - given that you are
> probably, not, as an individual, worth suing, and your motivation
> for doing interesting work is high - is very different to what a
> (probably) rich organisation like your university might be willing
> to do. If you want to do something, don't ask! (Specially not the
> university lawyers. You'll probably never get an answer - even
> more frustrating than a simple 'no'.)
>
> Sorry if that is not very helpful
>
> Adam
>
>
> On 6 January 2015 at 04:00, Damir Cavar <dcavar at me.com
> <mailto:dcavar at me.com>> wrote:
>
> Hi everybody,
>
> I know, this question has been addressed a lot, but, just to
> get an
> update on this issue and your expert opinion:
>
> If I am accessing the internet from the US, as I am right now,
> and I
> decide to generate N-gram-based language models by exploiting
> the web as
> a corpus and publish the word-lists and frequency profiles
> openly on my
> homepage, sell them even, change or manipulate them, and reuse
> them in
> various ways, would this be
>
> a. ok as fair-use for research only, excluding commercial use
> b. legal in general, independent of my research interests
> c. legal only in some countries (so, my models would be
> illegal in some
> others)
>
> What is the current status of the web as a corpus and
> extracted language
> models from the legal perspective in the US and globally?
>
> If I do the same now with open-access journals and extract
> frequency
> profiles of tokens for a certain research domain, would it be
> the same?
> It I use Google Books? Or even some news website?
>
> Is the extraction of a language model, maybe a domain specific
> frequency
> profile a copyright infringement per se? The text cannot be
> reconstructed, the content is not visible, the authors style
> neither, in
> particular not, if the corpus is larger etc.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Damir
>
>
>
> --
> Damir Cavar
> Department of Linguistics
> Indiana University
>
>
>
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> --
> =============================================
> Adam Kilgarriff <http://www.kilgarriff.co.uk/>
> adam at sketchengine.co.uk <mailto:adam at sketchengine.co.uk>
> Director Lexical Computing Ltd <http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/>
> Visiting Research Fellow University of Leeds <http://leeds.ac.uk/>
> /Corpora for all/ with the Sketch Engine
> <http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/> and SKELL
> <http://skell.sketchengine.co.uk/> //
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--
*************************************************
*Khalid CHOUKRI *
ELRA General secretary & ELDA CEO
email: choukri at elda.org ; Web: www.elra.info www.elda.org
Tel. +33 1 43 13 33 33 - Fax. +33 1 43 13 33 30
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