Data miners strike gold on copyright by Paul Jump.
From the post:
From early September, the biomedical publisher, which is owned by Springer, will publish all datasets under a Creative Commons CC0 licence, which waives all rights to the material.
Data miners, who use software to analyse data drawn from numerous papers, have called for CC0, also known as “no rights reserved”, to be the standard licence for datasets. Even the CC-BY licence, which is required by the UK research councils, is deemed to be a hindrance to data mining: although it does not impose restrictions on reuse, it requires every paper mined to be credited.
In a statement, the publisher says that “the true research potential of knowledge that is captured in data will only be released if data mining and other forms of data analysis and re-use are not in any form restricted by licensing requirements.
“The inclusion of the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication will make it clear that data from articles in BioMed Central journals is clearly and unambiguously available for sharing, integration and re-use without legal restrictions.”
As of September, the NSA won’t be violating copyright restrictions when it mines Biomed Central.
Being illegal does not bother the NSA but the Biomed news reduces the number of potential plaintiffs to less than the world population + N. (Where N = legal entities entitled to civil damages.)
You will be able to mine, manipulate and merge data from Biomed Central as well.