[GOAL] Re: Fwd: Re: Is CC-BY analogous to toll access?

[Peter Murray-Rust]

I am disappointed by the standard of much of the discourse on this list - I
had tried to refrain from posting, but the much of the material on licences
is absurdly wrong. I am a member of the Science Advisory Board of Creative
Commons and have some acquaintance with licences though I am not an expert.

I'd like to make the following points:
* licences are legal documents. They operate within various jurisdictions -
and the law is very different in different jurisdictions. There is a great
deal of work required to make a CC licence. The wording is very carefully
crafted.
* licences allow two parties to agree a contract. If one party feels they
have been wronged they may take the other party to court in an appropriate
jurisdiction. A licence (paraphrasing Lessig) is the right to defend
yourself in court. There are many other laws in force which may have
greater power than a licence and which may be used to control parties'
actions and freedoms.
* CC .licences are valuable in considerable part because they are portable
over many jurisdictions and fields of endeavour. Many companies create
ad-hoc terms and conditions which are (to my eyes) self-contradictory or
ambiguous, while CC licences have been written to be clear.
* the combination of material with different CC licences is very difficult.
Generally the more restrictive licence "infects" the less. So that if I
take CC-BY-NC material and combine it with CC-BY the result must generally
be CC-BY-NC, otherwise the terms of the CC-NC licence will be violated. It
is not allowed to change a restrictive licence to a less restrictive one
(i.e. the licence holder can sue you). Wikipedia (who has a much clearer
idea of licences than many people here) went through major restructuring of
material when they changed their licence and it required many individuals
to change the licence on their contributions.
* many of the possible effects of licences are unclear.One major problem of
CC-NC is that it is extremely difficult to define "commercial". Many
(including me) believe - with strong expert opinion - that CC-NC cannot be
used for teaching. Students pay money, so universities are running a
commercial activity. Motivation - e.g. non-profit - is irrelevant.
* another unresolved problem is the extent of virality.  If I have a CC-BY
or CC0 database and include a CC-BY-SA artefact does that require the rest
of the items to carry the more restrictive licence? The answer is that
no-one *knows*. We have been discussing this on the OKF open-science list [
http://lists.okfn.org/pipermail/open-science/2013-February/002242.html and
below] and the opinion of Puneet Kishoor (CC) is that it probably depends
on whether the item can be withdrawn without changing to nature of the
collection. But that is simply one expert's *opinion* - probably the only
way to find out is to sue or be sued

In terms of simplicity of use CC-BY is far simpler than many of the other
licences. I know I can retrieve and re-use CC-BY material without asking
permission. And so can my robot (#AMI2). Note also that in 10 years of
CC-BY BMC, PLoS, etc none of the suggested horror stories of CC-BY-induced
plagiarism, libel, patenting, theft of ideas, etc has happened. It's a
non-problem.

I suspect that many publishers are using CC-NC because they still wish to
control the scholarly literature. I am particular upset by NPG who will
offer CC-NC licences for one APC and charge more for CC-BY. There is no
benefit to the reader or author from CC-NC, the only beneficiary is NPG.
(And it doesn't cost more to use CC-NC because it is free and anyway has 3
fewer characters).

Note that simply because an artefact is visible on the web does not confer
any rights. This is the problem with many IRs which do not have clear terms
and conditions or have a blanket "copyright the university" or "all rights
reserved".

Now I am off to finish our "Liberation Software" (AMI2) which can
technically read a scholarly paper and create semantic XML from it.

If I am allowed to. I can only use CC-BY or CC0.

-- 
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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