Hmm, yes, actually. Common sense is handy :-) . I only recall a handful of lawsuits related to free stuff, and usually the point was to get a lot of money from someone in the size of IBM. I kind of doubt that free corpora from a university for a language without much commercial potential in NLP would result in something like this.
Best regards, Vadim ----- Original Message ----- From: Job M. van Zuijlen To: [email protected] Sent: Saturday, January 23, 2010 10:29 AM Subject: Re: [Mt-list] Public release of Haitian Creole language databyCarnegie Mellon Some of the verbiage used in this discussion (lawyer bomb...) doesn't particularly encourage people to make their data freely available. What happened to common sense? I think CMU's initiative should be commended. Job van Zuijlen From: Robert Frederking Sent: Friday, January 22, 2010 16:32 To: Francis Tyers Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: [Mt-list] Public release of Haitian Creole language data byCarnegie Mellon 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 _______________________________________________ Mt-list mailing list ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Mt-list mailing list ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Mt-list mailing list
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