In the world of creative works, notions espoused by
Lawrence Lessig and others over a number of years are becoming increasingly well understood. A
Creative Commons license, for example, is recognised as giving the holder of rights an ability to prospectively grant certain permissions rather than limit use of their work by expecting all comers to request these permissions, again and again. Those rights are
not cast aside, removing all opportunities to protect your work, your name, or your potential revenue stream. Rather, you are provided with a means to
explicitly declare that your work may be used and reused by others in certain ways without their needing to request permission. Any
other use is not forbidden; those uses must simply be negotiated in the ‘normal’ way… a normal way that
also applied to those uses covered by Creative Commons licenses before the advent of those licenses.
Creative Commons licenses are an extension of
copyright law, as enshrined in the legal frameworks of various jurisdictions internationally. As such, it doesn’t really work terribly well for a lot of (scientific, business, whatever)
data… but the absence of anything better has led people to try slapping Creative Commons licenses of various types on data that they wish to share. It will be interesting to see what happens, the first time one of
those licenses needs to be upheld via a court!
At
Talis, we have an interest in seeing large bodies of structured data available for use. Through the
Talis Platform, we offer one means whereby such data may be stored, used, aggregated and mined, although we clearly recognise that similar data may very well also be required in similar contexts.
Recognising that contributors of such data need to be reassured as to the uses to which we – and others – may put their hard work, we spent some time a couple of years ago drafting something then called the
Talis Community Licence. This draft licence is based upon protections enshrined in European Law, and has been used ‘in anger’ for a while to cover contributions of millions of records to one particular application on the Talis Platform.
There has been plenty of talk around ‘
open data‘ here on
Nodalities, and on our sister blog
Panlibus. See, for example,
this recent post from Rob Styles. There were also
fascinating discussions at the
WWW2007 conference earlier this year.
Despite interest in open (or ‘
linked‘) data,
licenses to provide protection (and, of course, to explicitly encourage reuse) are few and far between. Amongst zealous early adopters, there does seem to be a tendency to either (mis)use a Creative Commons license, to say nothing whatsoever, or to cast their data into the public domain. None of these strategies are fit for application to business-critical data.
Building upon our original work on the
TCL, we recently provided funding to lawyers
Jordan Hatcher and
Charlotte Waelde. They were tasked with validating the principles behind the license, developing an effective expression of those principles that could be applied beyond the database-aware shores of Europe, and working with us to identify a suitable home in which this new licence could be hosted, nurtured, and carried forward for the benefit of stakeholders far outside Talis.
Today,
Jordan posted the latest draft of this license (now going by the name ‘
Open Data Commons‘), some rationale, and pointers to various ways in which he – and we – are seeking input and further validation.
As my colleague Rob (again!)
has argued, curators of data
need an option on the permissions continuum
between free-for-all and locked down. The Open Data Commons,
née Talis Community Licence, offers that option.
Take a look. Think about how
you would use it. Consider what sort of administrative framework
you would want behind such a license.
Join the conversation.
Paul joined Talis in September 2005 from the Common Information Environment (CIE), where as Director he was instrumental in scoping policy and attracting new members such as the BBC, National Library of Scotland and English Heritage to this group of UK public sector organisations. Previously, Paul was at UKOLN where he was active in a range of cross-domain standardisation and advocacy activities, and before that he was Collections Manager at the Archaeology Data Service. At Talis, Paul is exploring new models of collaboration and identifying further areas in which our technology or knowledge would be of value. Paul has a Doctorate in Archaeology from the University of York.
I [i.e. KF] was recently interviewed by Nature on the state of blogs and anonymity and whatnot and the interviewer had an interesting question: Why is the population of chemistry blogs so high relative to other disciplines? There have been a number of posts on why chemistry is so absent in popular media – (IMHO, it lacks the “God element” present in biology/medicine and physics, especially astrophysics, which makes it less interesting to the masses. The complexities and fuzzy logic employed by astrophysicists requires nothing less than a religiosity to believe some of the odd shit they sling out.)
Anyway, it’s disheartening that there are very few blogs about physics and biology compared to chemistry since the future is integrated approaches. If I could, I would seek out a lively biologist to team up with on the Chem Blog, but I know of none. It would be awesome to have a readable blog about either field, since I consider both of them too far off topic to be approachable.
Anyway, my response to the Nature interviewer (the interview should be available via pod cast next month) was that the chemistry blog-o-sphere had a number of very strong voices and drew a lot of inspiration to a lot of people. Particularly catalytic in that was Dylan Stiles, 
P. Murray-Rust
Yes – I was running a biology and the Web session, only to find that Amos Bairoch was in the audience! How much of this is still in the collective web semi-consciousness. Somehow I am assuning that everything I now do leaves preserved digital footprints – is that naive? And what, if anything, could I do?