[OSM-legal-talk] CTs are not full copyright assignment

[john wilbanks]

Richard said:

I understand that Creative Commons declined to participate in drafting
ODbL when invited.  Why is that?  Why the sudden interest in data now,
after having declined the opportunity earlier?
 >>>>>>>>>

I don't speak for CC here, I speak for SC, which was far less integrated 
into CC than you might have imagined. It's why we eliminated the 
division and moved west. But we had our own Board, our own lawyers, our 
own staff, and we lived three time zones away from CC. And we didn't do 
a great job of being integrated.

As for SC, we were involved in the first go round of what became ODBL. 
We were able to convince all involved to write a public domain tool 
instead (PDDL) and then the SC protocol on data came out around the same 
time. CC also decided as a result, in part from what integration we did 
have between science and headquarters, to rebuild its public domain 
dedication as two tools - one a legal waiver (CC0) and one as a public 
domain "mark".

Here's some background that I am at liberty to share. I wasn't the only 
one working in and around here, so I am only going to talk about the 
stuff I was involved in.

First, there were differences in the European versions of the licenses 
that integrated database rights from other jurisdictions. After lengthy 
conversations in 2007 everyone agreed to turn those into waivers of the 
DB rights, so that if you use a jurisdiction specific EU 3.0 license, it 
should waive the DB rights. After that process, which was formally 
agreed to in 2007 at the Dubrovnik iSummit, we had to implement. That 
ate up a lot of what bandwidth we had for data rights.

Second, in late 2007, a key SC employee who would have been essential to 
any work on any ODBL became gravely ill and was basically out of action 
for six months. When that employee was finally back, we were way behind 
on day to day work and didn't have a ton of bandwidth for projects that 
weren't funded, like our biological materials transfer and patent 
licensing projects.

Third, after coming out with a strong statement against licensing data 
in the sciences, because our goal was interoperability, it would have 
been pretty hypocritical to then engage when people hired Jordan to 
start working on the revisions that became the ODBL (I believe that was 
actually OSM). I continue to think that the addition of a contract 
breaks interoperability - it certainly did so in the case of some core 
genomic databases - and that the creation and promotion of such a tool 
poses real risks in the sciences. I would rather work on getting OKF to 
discourage its use in the sciences, which is what Panton was all about 
for me. Panton basically says don't use licenses on publicly funded 
science data, including ODBL - or BY-SA.

So it's not like we have a "sudden interest" in data. CC's had an 
interest from day 1, from MusicBrains to Freebase to Encyclopedia of 
Life. SC's had an interest from day 1. It's just that to this community 
in particular we managed to conflate those interests.

It wasn't like we sat around and said hey, let's figure out ways not to 
work with the ODBL folks. We had very little time, lots of projects, not 
a lot of staff, and a lot of choices to make. We chose to put our time 
and effort at Science Commons elsewhere, and we weren't very well 
integrated with CC at that point either.

When I was in a previous job, I heard an aphorism that stuck with me. 
Never assume malice when you can assume conference calls. That about 
sums it up.

jtw

-- 
John Wilbanks
VP for Science
Creative Commons
web: http://creativecommons.org/science
blog: http://scienceblogs.com/commonknowledge
twitter: @wilbanks