Re: r-cran-maptools_0.7.16-1_i386.changes REJECTED (fwd)
Hi Stuart,
As far as we are concerned at the GeoDa Center, you're welcome to use
our sample data at http://geodacenter.asu.edu/sdata for all of the
purposes you mention, including sharing them with others, uploading
them on your local server for your students, listing them on your
personal website, simplifying the data, improving it, or other
educational uses. We appreciate listing the credit.
Our primary purpose for making the data available is for our tutorials
and software use. If you or others find them useful for other
purposes, please go ahead. Several of the sample datasets include ESRI
shapefiles and a lot of them are based on US Census data - we're not
sure what the legal restrictions are in this case but I can tell you
that as far as the GeoDa Center is concerned, anyone who wants to use,
add value, make available or any other use they see for our sample
data for non-commercial purposes is welcome to it.
Enjoy.
Julia
2009/3/13 Stuart Prescott <stuart+debian@nanonanonano.net>:
>
> Hi Julia,
>
>> A quick note that the public-use permission for the sample data files
>> on our site (http://geodacenter.asu.edu/sdata) haven't changed and we
>> don't intend to change them in the future.
>
> Thanks for your clarification -- perhaps you could answer a couple more
> questions about these data sets for me (as an interested observer to this
> discussion):
>
> It is obviously intended that I could download these datasets to work through
> the tutorials given on your site. Am I allowed to download the datasets and
> place them on a local server for my class to use them (with appropriate
> attribution) without each student having to download them directly from your
> site?
>
> Is it intended that other people are allowed to host these data sets on other
> websites (e.g. my personal website) and (with appropriate credit) allow
> others to download them from there rather than directly from the ASU website?
>
> If this *is* the case, then could you please state that somewhere on the page?
> Saying that the data is "available for use" is not the same as stating that I
> am allowed to also give away the data. (And if this is *not* the case, then
> the cran maptools people will need to remove the data sets from their
> downloads.) Copyright law generally needs an explicit permission to
> redistribute to be offered by the copyright holder, and "available for use"
> is not such a permission.
>
>
> Returning to my hypothetical class who are going to work through your
> tutorials, if I would like to work with simplified data (for didactic
> reasons), am I able to modify the data sets and offer the modified data sets
> to the class (with appropriate attribution)?
>
> If I were a researcher in the field, am I allowed to take these data sets and
> add to them or improve them through further work? (giving appropriate credit,
> of course!) May I then offer the derived data on my website for others to
> download?
>
> If this is the case, could you please explicitly state this on the website?
> Once again, "available for use" is not helpful in terms of copyright law,
> where distribution of a derivative work must be permitted by the owner of the
> original work.
>
>
> I don't think people are necessarily asking for a change to the public-use
> permission that you give -- it's wonderful to have such data available! But
> clearly stating the intentions of the licence would be most welcome. The more
> I think about the phrase "available for use", the less I understand exactly
> what it means.
>
> regards
> Stuart
>
> (who is obviously no longer just an interested _observer_ to this discussion)
>
> --
> Stuart Prescott www.nanoNANOnano.net
>
--
************************
Julia Koschinsky, Ph.D.
Research Director
Arizona State University
GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation
URL: http://geodacenter.asu.edu
Email: julia.koschinsky@asu.edu
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