[Lexicog] Re: Who owns your lexicon?

[meijg]

--- In lexicographylist at yahoogroups.com, "lingamish7" <david_ker7 at ...>
wrote:
>
> Here in Mozambique we have a number of linguists that have been
> collecting words sporadically over the last ten years or so.  Some of
> them have fair-sized databases of 1,000 to 3,000 entries.  In one case
> they are approaching the 10,000 entry mark.  In most cases they have
> been sitting on this data and never publishing it.  I'm curious about
> what approach we should take to that data.  Is it "owned" by NGO? 
> Should they be making it freely available to the language community
> that uses that language?
> 
> And in another situation, we hope to lead a country-wide lexicography
> project, producing basic word lists for the major Mozambican languages
> to be used in bilingual education.  Speakers of the various languages
> will probably be coming from a lot of contexts: work-for-hire,
> full-time employees of NGO's, and government representatives from the
> department of education.  Coming out of that project we should see ten
> or so lexical databases, but with such a diverse group of participants
> who will own the data?
> 
> My current standpoint is that the data will be freely shareable but
> any publications will be copyright of the organization that produces
them.
> 
> I'd appreciate any direction on this topic as it relates to long-term
> data collection by an expat as well as the country-wide project I
> described.
> 
> David Ker
> SIL Mozambique
>

Hoi,
When you contribute to a project that creates content, your
contribution's status depends on the terms of use of that project;
there are plenty projects that explicitly take the copyright of your
contribution. The next question is what license is it that this
collection has for it's content. 

The problem with the copyright of facts (like lexicological content
is, that you CANNOT copyright it. The best that you can do is
copyright a collection. This is why you often find "markers" in such
collections; they tend to indicate that a collection was copied when
it is found in another resource.

When you want to ensure that your data finds a good "home" it is
appropriate to look for a site that provides your information under a
FREE license. The licenses ensure that people down the road will have
access to the data and, are in a position to improve on this data.

This is a good moment to promote http://wiktionaryz.org . This is a
FREE project where lexicological (as well as other info) is stored
under a FREE license. It's first project is to provide the OLPC
project with dictionaries to be used in education in countries as
diverse as Nigeria, Brazil and Libya. Many more countries are likely
to use this resource (I hope including Mozambique ..)

Please have a look at WiktionaryZ, it is still very much in a
pre-alpha stage of development ..

Thanks,
    Gerard Meijssen




 
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