Monthly Archives: January 2008

Many Eyes, social networks for data visualization, and licensing

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I just finished listening to the IT Conversations podcast with Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg of Many Eyes. Many Eyes is kinda like Facebook meets Youtube but with data visualization thrown in. Users can upload data sets which can be manipulated and visualized by other users. What struck me is that in the whole 37 minutes, they didn’t discuss copyright or licensing at all, and IP isn’t even mentioned in the Many Eyes FAQ. Because Many Eyes is supported by IBM, digging through their terms of use produces a link to a standard assertion of copyright and notice of trade marks for ibm.com.

They have some pretty neat visualizations on here, including the US State of the Union 2008 speech as a tag cloud, a map of the underground economy as a percentage of GDP, a word tree of Alberto Gonzales’s testimony in the Senate, and annual visitors to UK railway stations.

Two issues come up in terms of rights — as this is supposed to be a social site around data, making clear the copyright status of the visualizations and giving users the rights to embed or remix these images would be important. They tangentially mention this in the podcast when the two principal researchers at Many Eyes discuss getting a request to place a visualization up on a website. They should think about making that clear up front.

The second issue is naturally enough, given the nature of the Open Data Commons, the rights associated with the data. Since users upload data, they could ask them to describe what rights the data comes under and then advertise that to the users. Users could also make clear the rights associated with data for datasets that they upload. For public domain data, they could use the Public Domain Dedication and Licence that we have produced. Or, once CCZero has gone live, they could use a CCZero Assertion, which would state that the user believes there to be no IP rights over the data.

The terms of use for uploaders, however, does include the following buried in the T&C’s (when creating an account):

You also agree not to submit anyone else’s copyrightable material to alphaWorks Services unless You obtain written permission of the copyright holder to license the copyrightable material to IBM, consistent with the terms of this Agreement.

But the upload page, in the section “Tell us about your data” doesn’t have a rights area. Though it does ask uploaders to give the source and a URL for the source, which could be useful in double checking the origin of data if you wanted to clear the rights.

Just some food for thought. And while you are there, be sure and check out the Size of Scottish Islands by group visualization.

CC Zero beta tools now available

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Creative Commons has released the beta version of CCZero (or CC ∅). CCZero implements the Science Commons Protocol for implementing Open Access Data by waiving related intellectual property rights, including copyright and unfair competition. Open Data Commons also implements this protocol in the Public Domain Dedication and Licence with the accompanying Community Norms statement.

The homepage for the licensing tool is at: http://labs.creativecommons.org/license/zero

There are actually two underlying CCZero legal tools: one waives copyright and related rights and the other asserts that the work has no copyright in the United States.

CC ∅ Waiver 1.0 United States

Human readable summary available here. Underlying legal code available here.

This legal code is for authors and rightsholder to waive copyright and related rights to the covered work and thus place it into the public domain. It is geared towards the law of the United States and does not mention, for example, database rightsUPDATE see below. It has a back-up license (like the Public Domain Dedication and Licence) in case a court finds the wiaver invalid.

CC ∅ assertion 1.0 United States

Human readable summary available here. Underlying legal code available here.

The assertion is for third parties (not authors or rightsholders) to say that they’ve looked into the copyright status of the work and believe it to be in the public domain — in other words out of copyright. The text limits the assertion to US law and includes a clause recognizing that the asserter may be liable for making this assertion.

Initial thoughts

I’ll be posting more about CCZero and its relationship to the Open Data Commons but initially I’d like to point out that:

  • CCZero is based on US law and doesn’t include a specific waiver of database rights, though further internationalisation will presumably result in versions that do waive database rights;
  • UPDATE — Apologies I initially missed it, but there is language waiving database rights thought they aren’t mentioned by name. The waiver states ” including but not limited to … and any rights protecting the extraction, dissemination and reuse of data ,..”
  • The assertion only covers copyright law and not other areas of law, including those covered by the waiver (privacy, moral rights, unfair competition, and so on), though this makes sense in the context of these other rights; and
  • The CCZero assertion only covers copyright law in the United States.

Both the Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication and Licence and the CCZero texts are drafts, and so your comments would be most welcome.

New site look

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I’ve update the theme for the site — I don’t claim to be a web designer by trade, and I’m aware of some needed tweaks that we will work on in the near future. However the original site was put up quickly and didn’t have trackbacks and comments working on the legal tools (and didn’t take advantage of the latest WordPress features). Any suggestions or offers of help most welcome.

2008 — year of open data

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After a short break for the holidays, we’ll be posting and promoting the new drafts more regularly. I hope that everyone had a pleasant time over the holiday break. Happy new year!

2008 is looking like it will be the year of open data. With the release of the Science Commons protocol, the announcement of CCZero, and of course our project, it looks like there will be quite a few options on the table for licensing data in an open way this year. This is after a long time where there were no good options for those looking at licensing data.

Hopefully we will soon release the draft Public Domain Dedication & Licence for use and then we can start getting some feedback from projects making use of the licence and their experiences. With some early adopters, we can quickly start to see some of the benefits of the public domain approach, and maybe some variations on the Community Norms (you are after all free to roll your own).

We will be doing some speaking and presentations on open data throughout the year — details as soon as they are available. One of many will be at this year’s OKCON on 15th of March at the London School of Economics. Details here. If you know of an event you think we should speak at about open data, please contact us with the details.