Re: [Treebase-devel] Treebase data license?

[Ryan S. <ry...@sc...>]

On Apr 26, 2012, at 7:53 AM, William Piel wrote:

> But with respect to the ownership rights of contributors, does anyone know any country where ideas (e.g. "Napoleon was born in 1769" or, in our case, "chimps are the sister group to humans") are owned or protected with respect to communication of said ideas? (as opposed to implementation or exploitation, such as patent protection on inventions). 

I'm not aware of countries that allow "ownership" of a single idea. But even a single Nexus file can qualify for protection under the database right, if it collects together a sufficient amount of information.

Regardless of the data's actual legal status, it would be useful to create an explicit statement about the rights and terms of use, so third parties like Carl aren't forced to make assumptions about their rights. Even better, TreeBase could require depositors to accept a particular rights statement at deposit time. This way, third parties would know that all deposits after date X fell under particular terms, even if the rights are unclear for earlier deposits.

If you don't want to make a particularly strong statement, you could use the same sort of weasel-language that GenBank uses. See the "GenBank Data Usage" section here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/. This isn't a great solution, but at least it clearly states the repository's opinion on reuse.

--- Ryan