I'm not a lawyer, but let me start by stating that out intent was
simply that re-use included acknowledgement. This was not intended to
be a splash-screen on every start-up, or making the software pronounce
our names at the start of every sentence. :-) It only has to be
"clearly visible" in anyone's source files.
We aren't interested in suing people; we are a non-profit research
organization. But like the Regents in California, we have a
responsibility to our sponsors that appropriate credit is given for our
work. So this is intended to be like the old BSD advertising clause,
which is generally considered to be clear from a legal point of view.
Please use the data however you want; just don't say you originally
collected it.
Bob
Francis Tyers wrote:
[ Sorry in advance for cross posting ]
I'm going over this on the debian-legal mailing list (a good place to
ask about issues in free/open-source software licensing).
There is a question about clause 5 of the licence:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
## 5. Any commercial, public or published work that uses this data
##
## must contain a clearly visible acknowledgment as to the ##
## provenance of the data. ##
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>From debian-legal:
My concern is whether, contrary to the favourable interpretation you
give, this is intended to act like an obnoxious advertising clause.
In other words, what will satisfy “contain” in “contain a clearly
visible acknowledgement”? Is it sufficient for the acknowledgement to
be “clearly visible” only after inspecting various files in the source
code?
Or is the copyright holder's intent that the acknowledgement be clearly
visible to every recipient, even those who receive a non-source form of
the work? The latter would be a non-free restriction, like the
obnoxious advertising clause in the older BSD licenses.
This looks, as it is currently worded, more like a lawyerbomb now that
I consider it. I would appreciate input on this from legally-trained
minds.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Could you confirm if that clause means that the acknowledgement should
be _clearly visible_ to _every recipient_ or would it suffice to be
visible after inspecting the source code?
Thanks for your help in this and best regards,
Francis Tyers
El dj 21 de 01 de 2010 a les 22:59 -0500, en/na Alon Lavie va escriure:
Hi Francis,
Thanks for the suggestion, but we were advised to leave the licensing
language as is. Our licensing language is effectively equivalent to the
MIT license.and is unambiguous with respect to releasing the data for
any use (commercial or non-commercial).
Best regards,
- *Alon*
Francis Tyers wrote:
El dj 21 de 01 de 2010 a les 14:49 -0500, en/na Robert Frederking va
escriure:
The Language Technologies Institute (LTI) of Carnegie Mellon University's
School of Computer Science (CMU SCS) is making publicly available the
Haitian Creole spoken and text data that we have collected or produced. We
are providing this data with minimal restrictions in order to
allow others to develop language technology for Haiti, in parallel with our
own efforts to help with this crisis. Since organizing the data in a useful
fashion is not instantaneous, and more text data is currently being
produced
by collaborators, we will be publishing the data incrementally on the web,
as it becomes available. To access the currently available data, please
visit the website at http://www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/haitian/
Would you consider also dual/triple licensing the data under an existing
free software licence, such as the MIT licence[1] or the GNU GPL[2] ?
This way it could be combined with existing data under these licences
(e.g. the majority of free/open-source software) and researchers and
developers don't need to hire legal advice to determine if they can
combine their work with yours.
Best regards,
Fran
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Licence#License_terms
2. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
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