On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 4:42 PM, Peter B. Hirtle <[email protected]> wrote: > Rufus, the content found in the database is on a particular lake, and consist > of biological and chemical parameters (counts of zooplankton, phytoplankton, > fish, other organisms, chemical analyses of water, etc.). It takes effort to > collect this content, and the faculty member who generates it wants > attribution. > > We know that the there is no copyright in the content: it is all factual. > And we know that the ODC-BY license won't work, since it is explicit that its > terms do not apply to the contents of the database, but only to the database > itself.
Let's address this part of your email. I think that you will find it important. You can use different licenses for the database as a whole, and for individual contents. Doing so makes more sense for some types of databases than for others. A database of songs might be licensed ODC-BY while each of the contents, the individual songs would have different terms. So you might have songs with expired copyright, songs still copyright and songs with CC licenses, all in the database. A user could search for songs in a certain key and time signature "I'll take 3/4 time in B-flat Major, please" and the app would return a list of songs including running time, or whatever. All of that would rightly be a product of the database, and be licensed ODC-BY. Now if you ask the database to return the sheet music and a recording for each song, the sheet music might have a publication copyright, and the recording might have a different copyright, and you'd have to abide by those if you wanted to create a CD, MP3 or perform a live concert. Perhaps what your scientist with a longing for the spotlight would accept, is ODC-BY database, with ODC-PDDL contents. ODC-PDDL acknowledges that the contents are factual and don't gain copyright, but that the use of a substantial portion of the facts from the database require attribution of the database itself. _______________________________________________ odc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/odc-discuss
