Re: [Treebase-devel] Treebase data license?

[William P. <wil...@ya...>]

On Apr 24, 2012, at 9:17 PM, Carl Boettiger wrote:

> Hi list,
> 
> I'm curious what license, if any, covers the treebase data? Dryad is very clear about all their data being public domain / CC0, but it's not obvious to me from the treebase website.  
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Carl

Our "story" so far is that in the spectrum of Art vs. Ideas, TreeBASE stores ideas. Even if the original published tree was an "artwork" with respect to the journal, in TreeBASE the nodes and edges are decomposed into tables, and when re-serialized you can't be sure that it will look like the original artwork. So in that sense we are storing the concepts or ideas, not the art -- and therefore while some of these objects may be patented, we don't think they should be copyrightable. Hence copyright simply does not apply to the data, only to the codebase. 

While citations and abstracts are often considered art (and we also store those), I think our redistribution of them is considered "fair use". 

bp