This is a comment I posted on the ChemSpider blog, one of two I tried to post. I’m cross posting here to make sure it’s public. Make sure to click through to the blog, it’s on the topic of using CC licenses on data. I sent an email to a list that got blogged, before I could get a chance to reconcile everything and contact the Chemspider guys. I think they should get complimented for their intentions and that they deserve tea and sympathy, because this licensing stuff is really complicated, and all they wanted to do was share.
In short, it’s a demonstration of how confusing data licenses make the position of data providers essentially untenable. From my perspective, the answer is either go public domain, or don’t. If you don’t, please make the metadata public domain. Anything is simply too confusing to figure out, and it’s going to be worse.
Part of the problem is that we have created a cargo cult around licenses. A contract will come from the heavens and make us free! But in data we’ve got the public domain right there to teach us. All we have to do is look up from the lawyer’s desk and follow the yellow brick road…er, the NCBI’s lead.
jtw
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I tried to post a comment but don’t know if it got through.
I did not intend for my comments to become public – that was a post to an advisory board list, intended to highlight precisely how this issue demonstrates the difficulty providers have in understanding licensing of data.
Creative Commons licenses were built for cultural works, like this blog or a website or music. They weren’t built for data. Data has different qualities and characteristics and thus requires different licensing approaches.
I would recommend you read the official CC position on this, which is the Science Commons Open Access Data Protocol (http://sciencecommons.org/projects/publishing/open-access-data-protocol/) and that you look at the best available legal tool to achieve the protocol (http://www.opendatacommons.org/odc-public-domain-dedication-and-licence/). These are regimes that facilitate data integration, unlike the CC BY SA license.
Please know that I salute your intent here and don’t want to slander you – you’re trying to share, and you’re confused on how to do so. I do believe that in our conversations I did indeed recommend to you the idea of releasing an RDF dump of your database in the public domain, using only the NCBI approach listed on this very blog. That’s essentially what we recommend at CC, as you’d see in the protocol.
Again, it was not my intent for this to go public before I could reach you, and I’m very sorry for that. It is never fun to make a decision and get pummeled for it, and from my perspective you don’t deserve the pummeling.
I’ll cross post this to my blog to make sure it gets online.
Hi John, thanks very much for your reply to the discussion. I have written up my thoughts on it, and as a quick summary, it seems to be about what freedoms you require for something to be open, and that the protocol does not only define the concepts of open use and redistribution, but also tries to solve the problem of combining data of different licenses. I don’t think those are the same issues, but would very much appreciate further elaborate from your side. Looking forward to learning where my argumentation fails…
My two blogs items can be found here:
Does ChemSpider really violate Open Data with CC SA?
John Wilbanks replies to the ChemSpider/OpenData discussion
Thanks for these illuminating posts John. Manual trackback to further thoughts at my blog.
John, Thanks so much for the thoughtful comments and post. There is definitely no need for you to apologize since the memo was an internal communication only. Relative to your comment “this licensing stuff is really complicated, and all they wanted to do was share.” You are correct …it is complicated. On the other hand we were already sharing. There has been pressure on ChemSpider to live to others views of what it should be since about two weeks after we went live and I have become increasingly frustrated with ChemSpider being pointed at for so many issues over the months. There have been so many stories and judgments made of us over the months (see, for example: http://www.chemspider.com/blog/another-response-to-constructive-feedback-from-peter-murray-rust.html).
So much of my time has been consumed dealing with this stuff that it has distracted from our more meaningful intention of Building a Community for Chemists.
I applaud the efforts of Creative Commons and have much respect for your efforts..I hope that became clear from our previous conversation. Clearly I AM responsible for not having researched the appropriateness of the CC licenses and fully own the resulting fallout. I hope that the conversations have brought some value to the domain of Open Data and Free Access Chemistry websites such as ours.
Re. your comment “It is never fun to make a decision and get pummeled for it, and from my perspective you don’t deserve the pummeling.” Thanks for that…you are right…I am little punch drunk and gun-shy now…
(Not sure why your comments on the blog never went through but our Akismet stats might explain…http://www.chemspider.com/blog/if-comments-to-blog-posts-dont-make-it-through.html)