OpenAIRE Legal Study has been published
From the post:
Guibault, Lucie; Wiebe, Andreas (Eds) (2013) Safe to be Open: Study on the protection of research data and recommendation for access and usage. The full-text of the book is available (PDF, ca. 2 MB ) under the CC BY 4.0 license. Published by University of Göttingen Press (Copies can be ordered from the publisher’s website)
Any e-infrastructure which primarily relies on harvesting external data sources (e.g. repositories) needs to be fully aware of any legal implications for re-use of this knowledge, and further application by 3rd parties. OpenAIRE’s legal study will put forward recommendations as to applicable licenses that appropriately address scientific data in the context of OpenAIRE.
CAUTION:: Safe to be Open is a EU-centric publication and while very useful in copyright discussions elsewhere, should not be relied upon as legal advice. (That’s not an opinion about relying on it in the EU. Ask local counsel for that advice.)
I say that having witnessed too many licensing discussions that were uninformed by legal counsel. Entertaining to be sure but if I have a copyright question, I will be posing it to counsel who is being paid to be correct.
At least until ignorance of the law becomes an affirmative shield against liability for copyright infringement. 😉
To be sure, I recommend reading of Safe to be Open as a means to become informed about the contours of access and usage of research data in the EU. And possibly a model for solutions in legal systems that lag behind the EU in that regard.
Personally I favor Attribution CC BY because the other CC licenses presume the licensed material was created without unacknowledged/uncompensated contributions from others.
Think of all the people who taught you to read, write, program and all the people whose work you have read, been influenced by, etc. Hopefully you can add to the sum of communal knowledge but it is unfair to claim ownership of the whole of communal knowledge simply because you contributed a small part. (That’s not legal advice either, just my personal opinion.)
Without all the instrument makers, composers, singers, organists, etc. that came before him, Mozart would not the same Mozart that we remember. Just as gifted but without a context to display his gifts.
Patent and copyright need to be recognized as “thumbs on the scale” against development of services and knowledge. That’s where I would start a discussion of copyright and patents.