opencontentlawyer.com

Another comment on FSF Europe, this time about intent and purpose of the Open Data Commons Factual Information Licence. This continues on from a previous post on opencontentlawyer:
There’s also an Open Data Factual Info Licence which puzzles me a bit because *information* is not covered by copyright, only the expression (the licence also seems to [...]

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Another comment from a discussion on Nodalities, this time about Creative Commons and databases:
Science Commons has a page with some explanations regarding Creative Commons and databases. It seems that two of the European versions of the Creative Commons licenses (Belgium and Netherlands) do mention the “database rights”. I’m not sure why this isn’t mentioned in [...]

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After a slight delay, PDF and ODT versions of the Database licence are now available.
PDF Link
ODT Link

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Another comment from a mailing list:

This looks like it’s falling into what I’ll call “the maximalist paradox” — That is the intention to “free” even more culture by instituting more laws that can be leveraged in a copyleft way to protect basic freedoms.
Another example is when the FSF tries to argue that using a [...]

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Another set of questions, this time on the FSF-Europe list
I’m slightly concerned about the triple-whammy of database licensing, copyright licensing and a contract.
The reason why database rights and copyright are in the same licence is because they overlap in some cases (in Europe anyway), and so in order to clear both you need a [...]

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Quick update. The survey on open content licensing and UK cultural heritage organisations has over 60 respondents. We have extended the survey, and hope to gain 100 or more respondents in total.
I gave a talk at Eduserv last Friday about the survey, and some preliminary results. I’ll try to post it up later [...]

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A question about contract and the Open Data Commons Database licence came up on one of the lists.
Why would I want to apply *additional* restrictions in a jurisdiction where there are no copyright or exclusive rights for databases?
This seems rather anti-commons to me.
The short answer is that by applying contract in a jurisdiction where the [...]

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Rob Myers wrote some excellent questions, and here is a response. I separated it out to a blog post to make it a bit more user-friendly, as there is a lot here to address. Thanks Rob for taking the time to write so much, and if you (or anyone else) have any further questions, [...]

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Introducing the draft Open Data Commons - Databases licence
This licence was inspired by the Talis Community Licence, and draws heavily from the work of others in the open source, free software, and open content community. Many of the ideas and phrases from the licence are derived from the unported Creative Commons licences, the Creative Commons [...]

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Open access to data, or just ‘open data’ is an issue that has been making the rounds in the scientific community for quite some time now. Some of the problems with increasing access are practical (what format it is in, physical access, and so on), but many of the problems are legal. These legal [...]

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