http://blog.dbtune.org/ Creating a music-related web of data en Fri, 25 Jul 2008 14:29:08 +0200 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Dotclear http://blog.dbtune.org/post/2008/05/12/LDOW-and-WWW-2008#c8136547 urn:md5:9ab41b12d45555720f4a351b97cf64cd Mon, 12 May 2008 18:12:08 +0200 Yves <p>Hello Paul!</p> <p>I actually completely agree with you. Explicit licensing in a machine-readable format is the key (and Creative Commons is the perfect example proving it). And the more open the licensing is, the better :-)<br /> It is also a daily problem that the &quot;re-user&quot; of data have to face as well. It is clearly not usual for data providers to give explicit licensing (apart from some exceptions, like Musicbrainz) - in the best case they provide buggy licensing that don't really apply to data.<br /> We must ask not only for the data to the providers, but also for explicit, machine-readable, licensing of it. And as you say, it needs a real meeting of minds between the three communities.<br /> But I have the feeling (at least in the domain I am mainly interested in) that most data providers don't even realise there is a problem here: only license drafters and re-users do. So we *really* need a serious outreach there.</p> <p>It might be useful to look at how such a realisation occurred in the Creative Commons and in the open-source worlds. In the CC world, I guess it is mainly due to the numerous court cases, and a sudden realisation that traditional licensing schemes were not fitted to handle new creative processes. In the open source world, I really have no idea :-)</p> <p>I just hope we won't need court cases to make such a realisation occur...</p> http://blog.dbtune.org/post/2008/05/12/LDOW-and-WWW-2008#c8136326 urn:md5:73d7ef5f986d5757accf9571b28fdf8d Mon, 12 May 2008 12:48:14 +0200 Paul Miller <p>Yves</p> <p>yes, it was a good workshop, wasn't it? :-) I hope you had a good time touring China. Other than the wandering (almost) Dr Heath, we just had to make do with two crammed days immediately after the conference, but managed to fit quite a bit in.</p> <p>To respond, specifically, to your point about Linked Data... yes, we definitely do need to be (and we are) talking to the data owners themselves.</p> <p>We also need to be talking to those who re-integrate, recombine and reuse the data (such as yourself). Firstly, in the eyes of the law 'ignorance is no defence.' Just because you can re-use someone's data doesn't mean you're allowed to. Those who reuse data need to be aware of the issues around what they're doing... especially as early 'experiments' and 'demonstrators' grow to become services that users rely upon; and that the data owners might actually notice and (possibly) question.</p> <p>Secondly, we all need to be applying ourselves to understanding ways in which a whole raft of licensing terms can be better expressed in machine-actionable form. I'd prefer that users didn't need to engage with most of this stuff. It would be far better if we had data stores that expressed their licensing terms, and applications that obeyed those terms as they worked with data coming from diverse sources. That requires a real meeting of minds between license drafters, data owners, and application builders. Several starts have been made, but we're certainly not there yet.</p> <p>We all, I think, want data to be as freely and widely available for re-use as possible. Licenses such as Open Data Commons aren't intended to constrain use. They're intended to explicitly and proactively describe all the things that you can do with someone else's data. They're an important missing piece in the journey from innovative and exciting experimentation (where, if we're honest, 'rights' and 'ownership' are rarely as carefully acknowledged or respected as they should be) to robust and sustainable delivery of services and applications.</p>