On Wed, Jul 07, 2004 at 06:10:12PM +0100, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
> The purpose of the flag day is to give people a chance to verify that
> the Guide does not contain non-original content whose licence would be
> violated by this change
I've been having a look at the legal pages for both Yell (which I've
been using to obtain address and phone number information) and Streetmap
(which I've been using to acquire OS co-ordinates for nodes), and I'm
unsure as to whether this is permitted at all, even before we take the
CC license into consideration.
Yell is full of thick legalese [1], but the relevant section is:
"4. Permitted uses
[...]
For the avoidance of doubt and without limitation, you are expressly
prohibited from:
[...]
i. modifying the data or other material from Yell.com ("the Data")
or merging the Data with any other data;
[...]
iii. using or redistributing the Data for the purposes of compiling
databases, lists or directories, other than as and to the extent
necessary to use the Data for a use not prohibited by this paragraph
4"
I'd say that OG definitely falls into the category of a directory, and
by adding our content and other data we're definitely falling foul of
4.i. Do we have some kind of fair use exemption here?
Similarly with Streetmap [2]:
"A single print of the results of a map search is permitted for your
own personal use. Otherwise the reproduction, copying, downloading,
storage, recording, broadcasting, retransmission and distribution of
any part of the Streetmap site is not permitted."
Do the OS co-ordinates count as part of the Streetmap site?
Dave
[1] http://www.yell.com/legal/home.html
[2] http://www.streetmap.co.uk/disclaimer.htm
--
"Just learn to hide the way that you feel, never let them know that
you're scared, but understand that you're not the special only one"
- New Model Army, "Ballad of Bodmin Pill"
IM: grimoire(a)jabber.earth.li | http://sparky.ox.compsoc.net/~grimoire
Hello. Welcome to the Licencing Discusion about the Oxford Guide. For
reference, other Licencing Discussions have been recorded:
<http://openguides.org/mail/openguides-dev/2003-December/000163.html>
<http://openguides.org/mail/openguides-london/2003-December/000179.html>
<http://london.openguides.org/?Licensing_Policy>
<http://www.nottinghamguide.org.uk/?Licensing_Policy>
This was supposed to be a completely thought through mail but I'll never
send it if I try and work through all the arguments in my head first...
The long and short of it is that we can't carry on with no statement of
a) Copyright holders [1]
b) a licence
if the site is going to run without hiccoughs for a long time to come
(which I hope, of course, that it will).
To begin with, copyright:
This is slightly tricky to apply in retrospect, for obvious reaons.
Certainly people have occasionally put work that is clearly copyrighted
to others into the Guide; I've sometimes left this content there until
the situation can be discussed properly. Where content is original to
the contributor, the same issue applies. We can't fully control and
licence the work sensibly with such a scattered set of copyright holders
(or at least we could, but it would likely cause problems in the
future). Therefore it is my preference to assign the copyright of all
content contributed to the guide to a single entity. The problem with
that of course is what entity...
Licensing:
We want to allow the best use of our work, focussing on the
non-commercial aspects, but do we want to rule out commerical
redistribution entirely? What about distributing by charging only at
cost? It would be really nice if at some point in the future the guide
could be turned into a paper booklet that could be distributed.
London and Nottingham both use this:
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0/>
Any objections to using it (or the updated version -
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/>)?
Let the discussion flow from here...
Dominic.
[1] Actually I'm not that sure about this bit, because it means we can't
include other suitably-licensed work in the guide at all. Nottingham
have the take-all-ownership line, London don't.
