[tdwg-content] Data Licenses; Was: Re: Occurrence Records, with Individuals and Identifications

[Vision, Todd J]

I'm not a lawyer, but "http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain" looks fine to me.  CCZero is CC's recommended instrument for waiving copyright to databases.  It is intended to apply to those jurisdictions where data/databases can be copyrighted and copyright can be waived.  Those terms of reuse are as clear and nonrestrictive as one could hope for given the present environment for data IP.  But since CCZero is not, strictly speaking, a "license", I agree with Bob that this is a slightly misleading tag.  Asserting CCZero (ie a public domain dedication) is implicity asserting "no license".

Todd Vision

Associate Director for Informatics
US National Evolutionary Synthesis Center

On Oct 24, 2010, at 12:35 PM, Bob Morris wrote:

> On Fri, Oct 22, 2010 at 12:47 AM, Peter DeVries <pete.devries at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I have redone my occurrence records to match the single example I had posted
>> before. (Go to the last example, if you just want something pretty)
>> Here is the
>> RDF: http://ocs.taxonconcept.org/ocs/f522444a-2dd9-400e-be59-47213ef38cb9.rdf
>> [...]
> 
>> - Pete
> 
> Without regard to the structure of your RDF but rather to your license
> attribute on txn:Occurrence, you might care that
>    (a) the CC Public Domain Mark license is intended to apply to work
> that was once copyrighted but now isn't.
>    (b)For lots of reasons, CC now recommends against the use of CC
> licenses for data ( [1], [2] ).
>    (c)Without regard to whether data is copyrightable, CC licenses
> only apply to copyrightable material; in all countries subscribing to
> the  Copyright Convention, only creative works are copyrightable;  I'm
> pretty sure you don't intend that an Occurrence is a creative work (or
> even that its expression is--at least an expression in a standard
> form).
> 
> [1] http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/open-access-data-protocol/
> [2] http://sciencecommons.org/resources/faq/database-protocol/
> 
> Bob Morris