[georss] Creative Commons
Jeff Harrison
jharrison at thecarbonproject.com
Thu Jun 8 12:51:34 EDT 2006
Joshua,
One strange part of your comments below -
"Who is it that holds the copyright and issues the CC license to
the material on the georss.org site?. Is an informal group sufficient or
would it be better for a legal entity to hold the copyright for clarity and
stability."
Actually, individuals (or groups of individuals) are perfectly acceptable
"legal entities" for copyright. Also, everything one writes is
automatically covered under US copyright, with or without the notification.
So the answer to your question is simple - those that wrote it already hold
the copyright.
(of course, there will be lots of responses from the attorneys on this list
:)
Regards,
Jeff
Jeff Harrison | CEO | The Carbon Project | www.TheCarbonProject.com | Phone
(703) 491 9543 | Mobile (703) 628 8655
-----Original Message-----
From: georss-bounces at lists.eogeo.org [mailto:georss-bounces at lists.eogeo.org]
On Behalf Of Josh at oklieb
Sent: Thursday, June 08, 2006 10:39 AM
To: georss at lists.eogeo.org
Subject: Re: [georss] Creative Commons
Perfectly happy to discuss this online, it's just that email threads
are not always the best tool for working through differing
understandings of terms or aims; sometimes they make them worse.
Let's try the email thread. We could fire up a #georss irc channel
(or use #eogeo or #geo )as well if that would work for Mikel and
others. If those do not seem to be converging effectively, we may
still need some conversations, but they can be reported and do not
need to involve everyone at once.
My understanding is that both OGC and W3C are able to deal with (e.g.
publish, adopt) documents whose copyrights belong to the authors, not
necessarily to the organization, but how and when are not resolved.
The two questions I see brought up here are:
1) Who is it that holds the copyright and issues the CC license to
the material on the georss.org site? Is an informal group sufficient
or would it be better for a legal entity to hold the copyright for
clarity and stability.
2) Should the OGC whitepaper which Carl put together be a multiply
authored (and copyrighted) paper by some of those georss contributors
which acknowledges the CC license of material from the site, or
should it be a "report on the georss material" by Carl (OGC staff)
which is OGC copyrighted, but carries the same CC license (or
equivalent) and attribution of the CC license on the site material?
I hope we can agree on multiple aims:
That a place where a variety of independent workers can help georss
to evolve is valuable (punctuated equilibrium for you evolution fans),
That endorsement by the respective organizations of versions or
snapshots of georss as extensions or refinements of either OGC (GML)
or W3C (Geo) or IETF (Atom) standards is also valuable both for the
use of technology and for those organizations.
We just need to reconcile any inconsistencies between these two aims
and get on with some real work (uh, I dunno, creating slide
presentations or maybe even coding).
Cheers,
Josh
On Jun 8, 2006, at 9:37 AM, Allan Doyle wrote:
>
> On Jun 7, 2006, at 18:12, Mikel Maron wrote:
>
>> I wouldn't be able to call in (just getting settled in the
>> dominican republic), as likely many other people here.
>> And in general, isn't it good to have a text record of such
>> discussions?
>> So my request is for this discussion to take place on the mailing
>> list.
>
> Sounds like a good request to me.
>
> Allan
>
>>
>> -Mikel
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----
>> From: "Josh at oklieb" <josh at oklieb.net>
>> To: Doyle Allan <adoyle at eogeo.org>; Raj Singh
>> <rsingh at opengeospatial.org>; Carl Reed OGC Account
>> <creed at opengeospatial.org>
>> Cc: georss at lists.eogeo.org
>> Sent: Wednesday, June 7, 2006 2:11:48 PM
>> Subject: Re: [georss] Creative Commons
>>
>> May I suggest a conversation tomorrow on this topic? Education and
>> negotiation on copyright issues which include control, credit,
>> access, and so on. We need to understand how those can flow back and
>> forth between organizations / communities and how to properly express
>> them to reflect what we think we are agreeing on.
>>
>> Line: +1 (405) 244-5555 (5699#) at 11am EDT
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Josh
>>
>>
>> On Jun 7, 2006, at 12:18 PM, Howard Butler wrote:
>>
>>> Carl,
>>>
>>> Can you please post a copy of the OGC GeoRSS
>>> paper on a website somewhere or on the
>>> maillist? I am not a member of OGC, and I'm sure
>>> other non-OGC members of the GeoRSS list would like to see it also.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>>
>>> Howard
>>>
>>> At 07:12 AM 6/7/2006, Allan Doyle wrote:
>>>
>>>> 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://>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 C 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
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> georss mailing list
>>>> georss at lists.eogeo.org
>>>> http://lists.eogeo.org/mailman/listinfo/georss
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> georss mailing list
>>> georss at lists.eogeo.org
>>> http://lists.eogeo.org/mailman/listinfo/georss
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> georss at lists.eogeo.org
>> http://lists.eogeo.org/mailman/listinfo/georss
>>
>>
>>
>
> --
> 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
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