[Aust-NZ] Geoscience Australia goes CC-BY

Sun Dec 6 15:11:18 PST 2009

Hi Brent

Your comments here are very good and well informed. A useful reference for licensing.

I would like to comment against only one part of your comments below, which is about attribution. If you develop any information in Film or Video or Web, then every reference to source code (backend, to Javascript), images, video and all media should (and in many cases "must" be attributed). This is a common thing in a more art based industry. As such, large groups, like RMIT (university) has to keep dedicated groups just to keep information on licenses and attribution - and maintain that information on their sites for required reference.

Take that one step further, and work in Education (my background has been in education software for more than 15 years), where we incorporate something like Aboriginal content, and we have a very rich and complex licenses which have to be adhered to, right down to removing content in certain circumstances and at certain events (e.g. in the event of the death of the author).

In the commercial world, when we bring in sources of data such as Weather observations, Terrain, Roads & Rivers, Population, etc etc - we are required in those licenses to not only attribute the source, but also many of the intermediate sources (eg. one provider may convert data from another source - such as the Census data being converted into other data formats).

And if you ever look into the details box of the about of a program, it usually goes on for many pages where the source of content or code comes from.

In the end - content, data, code - should be treated the same. 

A good example - Open Street Maps - it is edited like content, but it acts like data - which is it?

Arguably there are exceptions in law. E.g. if I work on data for my customer it belongs to my customer (assuming I don't sign something to the contrary). Where as as a photographer if I take photos for my customer, they belong to me.

So two things in conclusion:

* We should - even if it is not required in the license (e.g. public domain) attribute our sources. It is the right thing to do.
* And the difference between code, data, config, content - is so indistinguishable that any difference become arbitrary, so treat them the same.

Now that said, your comments here about use of other licenses and the issues with CC are still valid and well informed.

Thanks

Scott

----- pcreso at pcreso.com wrote:

> Hi Brianna,
> 
> I have some concerns about the adoption of CC licences for data, which
> are shared by others, & have been discussed on the net in various
> places...
> 
> CC was designed as a content licence, not a data licence and IMHO has
> two main shortcomings as a data licence (and open database licences
> have yet further idiosyncracies).
> 
> Firstly, CC3-BY allows the data to be released with whatever
> attribution requirements the data provider cares to add. Not a problem
> for content generally, but the point in releasing data is to allow it
> to be used & re-used with other data & derivative data. Tracking &
> implementing some attribution requirements in this situation can lead
> to situations where the required attribution is impossible, difficult
> or cumbersome for users. If CC3 is to be used for data, then a common
> & facilitative standard government attribution requirement should be
> incorporated instead of the usual unrestricted one, which lets
> everyone create their own.
> 
> Secondly, any information on data provenance (metadata) is not
> required. To be useful, all such datasets should have some basic
> metadata available. For example, data precision, date of release, date
> of expiry (or when it is due to be superceded), etc. A road centreline
> dataset, or census information, or land use data is of very restricted
> use unless this information is available to provide users with enough
> information to know if the dataset is unsuitable for the intended
> purpose for any reason. Without this information datasets can easily
> be misused, misinterpreted & provide misleading results. If I have two
> census datasets, but don't know what year each was taken.... etc. 
> 
> Several licences for freely available (open) data are available & more
> are being developed, much like the variety of licences for FOSS
> software (GPL. LGPL, BSD, Apache, MIT, etc...)
> 
> A few examples of Open Data licences & sources of information: 
> 
> http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/
> https://biblios.net/pddl
> http://www.opencontentlawyer.com/open-data/open-database-licence/
> http://opendefinition.org/guide/data
> 
> 
> One example that may be of interest, the organisation I work for, NIWA
> in NZ (comments are my opinion, not necessarily NIWA's :-), used to
> sell access to our national climate database. About 18 months ago we
> made this freely available. We went from around 200 paying users to
> currently about 10,000. 
> 
> It has implications for the organisation, and some users now have
> expectations of availability, so any downtime (even for a free
> service) can occasionally result in quite abusive demands, but I
> believe the freeing up of these data has been a very positive exercise
> overall, despite the inevitable leeches of such services :-)
> 
> 
> Cheers,
> 
>   Brent Wood
> 
> --- On Mon, 12/7/09, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > From: Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher at gmail.com>
> > Subject: [Aust-NZ] Geoscience Australia goes CC-BY
> > To: "OSGeo Aust-NZ" <Aust-NZ at lists.osgeo.org>
> > Date: Monday, December 7, 2009, 1:28 AM
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Apologies if this was discussed before, but I was wondering
> > if the
> > Geoscience Australia move to the CC-BY license had come to
> > the
> > collective attention?
> >
> http://www.ga.gov.au/about-us/news-media/latest-news/index.jsp#commons
> > 
> > As a geospatial onlooker rather than in-the-thick-of-it
> > member I would
> > be interested to hear from the folks here what they think
> > this is
> > likely to mean, or how it may play out, eg more stuff
> > available
> > directly online, less sales?
> > 
> > cheers
> > Brianna
> > (Wikimedia Australia)
> > 
> > -- 
> > They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right
> > moment:
> > http://modernthings.org/
> > _______________________________________________
> > Aust-NZ mailing list
> > Aust-NZ at lists.osgeo.org
> > http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/aust-nz
> > 
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http://scott.dd.com.au/
scottp at dd.com.au