Re: [CDAO-discuss] terms of reuse

[Vision, T. J <tj...@bi...>]

+1 to Hilmar's suggestion.  

Some advice from Creative Commons: http://sciencecommons.org/resources/readingroom/ontology-copyright-licensing-considerations/

CC-BY appears to be a common choice, as well, though IMHO it is gratuitious "lawyering up", and could harm adoption by prohibiting 'remix' uses in which attribution is no longer a reasonable expectation.

-Todd
 
> Hi all,
> 
> I saw that the license attached to CDAO on the SourceForge project  
> page is the GPL. This is indeed also what's stated in the paper, so I  
> should have noted long ago.
> 
> The GPL is, I think, a rather bad choice for licensing CDAO. First, it  
> was designed for software, and how to apply the terms to an ontology  
> are not so clear. It's specifically not clear how to interpret the  
> "viral" terms of the GPL in the case of someone reusing an ontology,  
> provided that such viral terms were actually desired. Second, as I  
> think we are all interested in the broadest possible reuse of CDAO, a  
> "share-alike" requirement in reality I think does more harm than good.  
> Third, as a license GPL actually implies (and asserts) copyright.  
> While in some ways one may see an ontology as a work of creative art,  
> and hence as eligible for copyright protection, much of the things  
> asserted in CDAO (as in most other life science ontologies) are facts,  
> which at least in the US are not eligible for copyright protection. So  
> at least it's a grey zone situation. Perhaps more importantly,  
> copyright protection and licensing are *legal* instruments, useful for  
> enforcing one's rights in a court of law. However, what we are  
> probably rather interested in instead is that certain community norms  
> for giving credit (attribution) are met by those reusing the ontology  
> wherever this can be reasonably expected. A public-domain dedication  
> can state those expectations just as well, and possibly better, than a  
> license, while removing all barriers to reuse. (For example, licensed  
> content with copyright assertion, whether with solid or questionable  
> legal standing, creates all kinds of headaches in aggregations that  
> would result in mixed licensing situations.)
> 
> Therefore, I would suggest that the CDAO license be changed to a  
> public-domain waiver, with an attached declaration of expectations for  
> attribution.
> 
> As an example for how this could look like, here are the terms of  
> reuse for the Teleost Anatomy Ontology (TAO), as contained in the OWL  
> file [1]:
> 
> "To the extent possible under law, Wasila M. Dahdul has waived all  
> copyright and related or neighboring rights to the Teleost Anatomy  
> Ontology (TAO), under CC0 license (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ 
> ). This work is published from the United States. It is requested that  
> users of this vocabulary cite the following publication: Dahdul, W.M.,  
> Lundberg, J.G., Midford, P.E., Balhoff, J.P., Lapp, H., Vision, T.J.,  
> Haendel, M.A., Westerfield, M., and Mabee, P.M. (2010). The Teleost  
> Anatomy Ontology: anatomical representation for the genomics age.  
> Systematic Biology 59, 369-383. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/sysbio/syq013"
> 
> (Note: In comparison, the CDAO at present actually has no such  
> statement in the OWL file, so a machine accessing the ontology would  
> have no way to know. [And yes, it would indeed be pretty hard for a  
> machine to extract the above as the pertinent terms of reuse from the  
> OWL translation, as I've explained on the OBO format list [2]. But  
> that's because it is maintained in OBO format - for CDAO we could  
> choose how to expose this directly in OWL.])
> 
> 	-hilmar
> 
> [1] http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/tao.owl
> [2] http://bit.ly/uZBlae
> 
> -- 
> ===========================================================
> : Hilmar Lapp  -:- Durham, NC -:- informatics.nescent.org :
> ===========================================================