Re: data "copyright" or not -- what is Debian's take? (original) (raw)

Yaroslav Halchenko debian@onerussian.com writes:

Should I advise to blindly attach a copyright statement and license, possibly copyrighting non-copyrightable, thus committing "Copyfraud" in some jurisdictions?

Probably not, as this would be illegal in said jurisdictions.

What would be the take of Debian ftpmasters whenever they receive a package shipping data without clean copyright/license statement and something like this instead:

This data has been collected 2010 by Author1, Author2. Please recognise the substantial effort that went into the collection of this data by attributing the authors. Attribute by citing the original publication: Author1, Author2, Title of the paper, where published, 2010, URL: http://....

This is also problematic. First, it does not grant the necessary permissions for DSFG-freeness in jurisdictions where this would be needed (e.g., all EU member countries). Second, it imposes a citation requirement, which is generally regarded as discriminating against field of endeavor, thus failing DSFG § 3. It is much better to mention the relevant publication in a note outside the license text. And third, in jurisdictions where the database creator does not hold any rights to the database contents, trying to impose such a requirement might again be regarded as copyfraud.

Or should I advise to use the text of MIT license, verbally and explicitly describing possible uses and disclaiming any warranty? but once again without any copyright statement.

I think the best thing would be to use the Open Data Commons PDDL [1], which was explicitly created for such situations.

Hendrik

[1] http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/pddl/1.0/

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