Re: Assigning CC-BY-4.0 licence to CIF dictionaries

Herbert, can you describe a concrete scenario in which CC-BY-SA would reduce chaos more than CC-BY? CC-BY-SA still allows modification and distribution of altered dictionaries, and it is not clear to me that e.g. the liberal MIT licence has actually brought more chaos to projects using it than the GPL.

On Thu, 4 Apr 2024 at 00:10, Herbert J. Bernstein via comcifs <comcifs@iucr.org> wrote:

Personally, I would prefer CC-BY-SA for any dictionary to CC-BY, since the SA clause

reduces the chance of abuse by malicious actors, for the same reason that the infectious

GPL is the most effective license for open source software to prevent abuse.   Yes,

Steve is right that the CC-BY licenses are hard to enforce -- they have not been

tested in court that way the GPL has -- but if our intention is to limit the spread of

conflicting dialects CC-BY-SA at least makes our intention to reduce the chaos clear. 

On Wed, Apr 3, 2024 at 7:10 AM Brian McMahon via comcifs <comcifs@iucr.org> wrote:

I confirm that CC-BY-4.0 would fit in with the projected workflow that
the Chester office has in place for assigning DOIs to future releases
of the dictionaries.

Two corollaries:

(1) Should we then have a _dictionary.licence term in the DDLm dictionary?
    That would advertise the licence explicitly upon opening the dictionary.
    Perhaps one also needs a _dictionary.licence_url to allow the full
    content of the licence to be retrieved?
(2) If so, we can enforce a single enumeration value (CC-BY-4.0) or we can
    allow additional values (if the community needs that for the exemptions
    that might be required e.g. by funding bodies as James mentions).

Brian


On 03/04/2024 05:09, James H via comcifs wrote:
> Dear COMCIFS,
>
> It may come as some surprise that no licence is attached to our
> dictionaries. As these are machine-readable, they are available for
> other automated ontology-management systems (e.g. EMMO) to ingest and
> transform, however, the lack of a licence opens them up to perceived
> legal jeopardy. From time to time in the past licensing has been raised
> but not followed through on, the latest as far as I can tell being 2011.
> An educational thread from 1999 can be read
> https://www.iucr.org/__data/iucr/lists/comcifs-l/msg00032.html
> <https://www.iucr.org/__data/iucr/lists/comcifs-l/msg00032.html> and the
> statement of IUCr policy originating at that time is at
> https://www.iucr.org/resources/cif/comcifs/policy
> <https://www.iucr.org/resources/cif/comcifs/policy>
>
> Since that time, Creative Commons have produced licences for material
> that is intended to be shared. These licenses are designed to work
> across international legal systems. The two which seem most appropriate
> to us are CC0 (public domain), which is essentially renouncing all
> rights conferred by copyright, and CC-BY, which does the same, but
> requires attribution and that any changes to the original are clearly
> indicated. I urge you to have a look at
> https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/
> <https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/> for background on
> creative commons.
>
> Having pondered the above, I would like now to propose that our
> dictionaries are licensed as CC-BY, for the following reasons, based on
> the decision points in the Creative Commons "chooser" tool:
>
> 1. We need to pick a licence for clarity (see above)
> 2. CC0 (public domain) would theoretically allow somebody to take our
> dictionaries and claim them as their own or to distribute subtly but
> incorrectly modified versions. Note that the wwPDB does license their
> data as CC0, so this concern on my part may be misguided, particularly
> in a scientific community where the IUCr is an authoritative source
> 3. We do not wish to restrict use of our dictionaries for commercial
> purposes, for example, if a diffractometer manufacturer wished to bundle
> a dictionary and add their own data names to it, they should not need to
> spend their time or our time gaining permission. Simply following the
> rules for attribution and flagging modifications should be enough.
> 4. Transformation and adaptation of our dictionaries is an increasingly
> common approach as neighbouring disciplines realise that they can save a
> lot of time (e.g. the ongoing EMMO work). Allowing this type of
> modification is just normal scientific practice, where one group builds
> on the openly available results of other groups, so we should not
> restrict it
> 5. We could require that any modified versions are published under the
> same licence, which would then make it CC-BY-ShareAlike. My opinion is
> that this type of restriction just introduces friction, for example,
> some funding body may require all outputs to be licensed according to
> some quite liberal licence that is not clearly compatible with
> CC-BY-ShareAlike, and so there's a need to seek an exemption.
>
> Please discuss. Those with insight into the wwPDB's choice of CC0 are
> welcome to weigh in. If there are no outstanding objections by the end
> of the month I will take that as agreement.
>
> best wishes,
> James.
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