[georss] Creative Commons

[Allan Doyle]

On Jun 6, 2006, at 18:54, Carl Reed OGC Account wrote:

> Allan -
>
> Yes, this needs to be "hashed" out because as we move components of  
> GeoRSS into W3C and the OGC, we need to deal with those  
> organizations respective copyright and IPR policies. I also need to  
> work copyright between W3C and the OGC for shared documents. I also  
> have a very similar issue with a group in Germany that developed  
> CityGML. They put their copyright on the document even though it is  
> a GML Application Schema. In that case, we are looking at shared  
> copyright with due attribution to both parties.

We started the site with the Creative Commons license, That was by  
mutual agreement among Raj, Josh, and myself when we first set it up  
last year. Since then, people have been contributing to the site,  
presumably under the impression that their work was being covered  
under that license.

I did not pose the question to open a discussion about changing the  
license, but rather to figure out who the licensor should be. I think  
the licensor is in fact the group of people who contributed to the  
spec, even if there is no specific organization we can name. Those  
people whose names appear in the email archives at http:// 
lists.eogeo.org/pipermail/georss/ would be considered to be the  
collective license holders in my opinion. If you want to change the  
license, I would expect that you would need to get permission from  
each of them.

I personally felt it was important to put a CC license on the parts  
of the work I contributed. I feel that this is the only way to ensure  
that the work be kept open in the face of today's seemingly  
ineluctable drive to eliminate all possibility of letting the "little  
people" have control of any intellectual property.

If you posted a GeoRSS white paper for the OGC membership, then I  
don't see any reason that the white paper should not itself be  
covered under the Creative Commons license. If I were still an OGC  
member, I would certainly be advocating that any OGC staff time spent  
writing documents should result in Creative Commons licensed material.

I note that deegree, an OGC reference implementation,  which was  
presumably voted on by OGC members to receive the designation as a  
reference implementation is covered by the LGPL, a viral license.  
Thus, you expect others to abide by that license and would expect  
them to make any modifications of that code public under the same terms.

I also note that there are some OGC specifications that are available  
only by paying a fee to ISO or ANSI (http:// 
feature.opengeospatial.org/forumbb/viewtopic.php?t=305).

I believe it's in the best interests of keeping GeoRSS open and  
available to everyone to for us to keep it under a Creative Commons  
license.

>
> Yesterday, I posted a candidate GeoRSS White Paper for  
> consideration by the OGC membership. I state several times that  
> some of the material is either extracted from or a synopsis of the  
> content on the GeoRSS web site.

I think it would be courteous to the rest of the georss contributors  
who don't have access to that document to post it here.

 From the paper, here are those several mentions:

"GeoRSS, created outside the OGC but supported and sponsored by the  
OGC and likely to become an OGC standard,"

"The majority of the content in this document can also be found –  
with many
examples – on the GeoRSS web site – www.georss.org."

"The GeoRSS developers, a small group of OGC staff and members and  
other highly
creative "geohackers,"

> So, for this white paper, what do we do about copyright? The  
> current OGC copyright is now consistent (yes, finally!) and not  
> nearly as restrictive as it used to be. So, I would suggest, as  
> with CityGML, shared copyright.

For this white paper, please do the following things:

1. Remove the OGC copyright statement from the top which says:
"Copyright © 2006 Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. All Rights  
Reserved. To obtain additional rights of use, visit http:// 
www.opengeospatial.org/legal/.

2. Remove my name and the EOGEO name which you used without  
permission as an author and as a submitting organization (EOGEO is  
not an OGC member so we certainly can't be a submitting organization,  
unless your rules have changed).

3. Add in the following wording:

"Material in this white paper is taken from the source material at  
http://www.georss.org under the terms of the Creative Commons  
Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license."

*and*

"The contents of this document are covered under the Creative Commons  
Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license which can be found at http:// 
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/"

Thanks,

	Allan

>
> Thoughts welcome.
>
> Cheers
>
> Carl
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "Allan Doyle" <adoyle at eogeo.org>
> To: <georss at lists.eogeo.org>
> Sent: Tuesday, June 06, 2006 2:58 PM
> Subject: [georss] Creative Commons
>
>
>> The question came up today, our site is covered by a Creative Commons
>> Attribution Share Alike 2.5 license, but we don't say what
>> attribution to give, nor do we provide a contact address.
>>
>> I suggest that we say
>>
>> ===============
>> All uses of this material must be accompanied by the following
>> statement:
>> "CC - Material from GeoRSS.org web site, used under Creative Commons
>> Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License."
>>
>> That also means that any document which uses this material must also
>> be available under the same terms. Please read the license!
>> ================
>>
>> Or something like that. I think we really need a "licensor", and I'm
>> not sure whether the licensor must be a legal entity (i.e. a person
>> or a corporation) or whether it can be a group (the "GeoRSS
>> Development Team").
>>
>> It might be good to hash this out quickly...
>>
>> Allan
>>
>>
>> -- 
>> Allan Doyle
>> +1.781.433.2695
>> adoyle at eogeo.org
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> georss mailing list
>> georss at lists.eogeo.org
>> http://lists.eogeo.org/mailman/listinfo/georss
>

-- 
Allan Doyle
+1.781.433.2695
adoyle at eogeo.org