George Mason University is being sued by Thomson Reuters to prevent the distribution of the excellent Firefox plugin, Zotero.  As reported via the Courthouse News Service:

Thomson Reuters demands $10 million and an injunction to stop George Mason University from distributing its new Web browser application, Zotero software, an open-source format that allows users to convert Reuters’ EndNote Software. Reuters claims George Mason is violating its license agreement and destroying the EndNote customer base.

Subject of a Talking with Talis podcast last year with Trevor Owens, Zotero is an impressive free open source tool for capturing, organising and citing research resources, that has been building a successful community of users around it.

Thomson Reuters is complaining about the 1.5 preview release of  Zotero, announced on July 8th, which introduces several new features including:

Support for thousands of existing Endnote® export styles.

Following that link to Endnote export styles you end up on a page containing the following words:

EndNote output styles are provided solely for use by licensed owners of EndNote and with the EndNote product.

That seems to be the bit that is behind the legal action taken.  The question is can they, or should they, enforce such a restriction – not being a legal expert I’ll stop ruminating further in that direction.

The folks in the Center for History and New Media at George Mason, must be wondering what has hit them, but you can’t go rattling the current business model of a someone the size, history and market position of Thomson Reuters without expecting some form of backlash.

I can imagine the cries of outrage that will emanate from the Open Source and Open Data communities because of this.  They will no doubt be matched by indignation and litigious thoughts from the commercial sector as other publishers check to see how Zotero is helping to distribute their output but not necessarily in a way they would like.

It’s ironic then that somewhere else in the Thompson  Reuters organisation there is a site/service with the following ambition:

We want to make all the world’s content more accessible, interoperable and valuable. Some call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the Semantic Web or the Giant Global Graph - we call our piece of it Calais.

Calais (Powered by Thomson Reuters) is a semantic web technology based project which in simple terms provides an API to information about people, organisations, geographies, books, authors, events, facts about them, and links between them.  It is a free API service can be used openly, for commercial and non-commercial use, to enrich applications.  (For an insight in to Calais and how it fits with Reuters’ business, I can recommend the podcast Paul Miller recorded with Barak Pridor of ClearForest, the technology with which Calais has been built).

The action being taken against Zotero is symptomatic of the classic growing pains as technology and distribution mechanisms move on.  Just like the scribes complaining  about movable type in the 1400’s, or  the music industry complaining about the mp3 download culture that emerged some 600 years later.

I predict that this will only one skirmish in a series of battles that will ensue as the information and knowledge publishing and distribution industry morphs into something new.  Will actions like this prevent it happening? - of course not.  Will it slow it down? – possibly.   If I was part of the Zotero project would I be worried? – yes, I might be;  some of the early vanguards of the music download revolution were forced out of the race by such legal challenges.  Nevertheless, be it the opening of access to newly created knowledge or providing useful open access to traditionally controlled data, things are a changing.  We will look back on actions like the one against Zotero, viewing them as inevitable battles to try to preserve rapidly outdating business models – anybody read the Innovator’s Dilemma recently!

I hope  that the Zotero folks survive to reap the rewards of their pioneering efforts.

Share This

When, on the April Library 2.0 Gang, Tim Spalding asked Google Product Manager Frances Haugen about the uses of Google data, specifically book jacket images received via their new API, we got the impression that there were no restrictions against using them for display in your OPAC.

As Tim posted last week, things seem to have changed:

A few months ago when the Google Book Search API came out, I was among the first notice that GBS covers could be used to deck-out library catalogs (OPACs) with covers, potentially bypassing other providers, like Amazon and Syndetics. I subsequently promoted the idea loudly on a Talis podcast, where a Google representative ducked licensing questions, giving what seemed like tacit approval.

It seemed so great–free covers for all. Unfortunately, it now seems that it was too good to be true. At a minimum, the whole thing is thrown into confusion.

Tim was contacted by ‘a major cover supplier’ saying that a large percentage of the Google covers were, in fact, licensed to Google by them. They never intended this to be a "back door" to their covers, undermining their core business. - oops!

This coupled with the recent alteration to the Amazon Web Services customer agreement:

5.1.3. You are not permitted to use Amazon Associates Web Service with any Application or for any use that does not have, as its principal purpose, driving traffic to the Amazon Website and driving sales of products and services on the Amazon Website.

… means that those looking for a free source of book jackets will have to look elsewhere?

Share This

Mirroring the moves from Harvard University earlier in the year The University of Sterling has become the first academic institution in the UK to oblige staff to make all their published research available online.

Stirling is leading the way in open access to its research work, after the University’s Academic Council issued an institutional mandate which requires self-archiving of all theses and journal articles.

Professor Ian Simpson, Deputy Principal (Research and Knowledge Transfer) said: “We believe that the outcomes of all publicly funded research should be made available as widely as possible. By ensuring free online access to all our research output, we will maximise the visibility and impact of the University’s work to researchers worldwide.”

The four year project to create STORRE (Stirling Online Research Repository) has been brought to fruition by information technology specialists Clare Allan and Michael White.

Clare Allan said: “The University now requires all published journal articles to be deposited by authors, as soon as possible after they are accepted for publication, and in compliance with the publishers’ copyright agreements.

Many of the major UK research funders now require open access to published results from research awards they fund, but by going a step further and ensuring that this is done in every case, the University of Stirling is setting a high standard of access that is expected to reap rewards.

STORRE is available to search here.

As I said when commenting about the vote at Harvard "If Open Access publishing by default system spreads across the rest of the faculties and to the wider world, this could be the beginning of a seismic shift in scholarly publishing" - and I still believe that.

Share This

A couple of days ago Richard blogged about data licensing on The Open Library.

Aaron came back to comment:

Our position is that the actual catalog data on Open Library consists of uncopyrightable facts and thus is public domain. We certainly aren’t going to assert a copyright on it. The real open question is what copyright to use for descriptions and bios and other longer textual material — should we use GFDL, like Wikipedia, or some more reasonable license?

Certainly I agree with him that the factual data cannot be protected by Copyright. Facts, titles, names, short phrases, single words; none of these can be Copyrighted in the sense of a Creative Work, but there is more to Copyright than that.

A few weeks back I was talking in Banff and then in Paris about the need to license data, not to keep it closed, but to keep it open. In that discussion I broke the world into three parts, Data, Metadata and Content. Aaron is doing the same kind of split - bibliographic data and review content. That’s the right distinction to be making.

For the creative aspects there is Copyright protection, and various licenses extend this in different ways, CC, GFDL and others. The Open Library should pick whichever is the closest match to what they want to achieve. I suspect a CC-BY license would be closest, but that’s a decision for them and the community.

But what about the data? The question isn’t “can it be protected?” but “how does it need protecting and what from?”.

Now, I trust the Internet Archive. They’re probably the only people on the internet to have a wholly untarnished halo and that’s a very good thing. But things can change. There are direct parallels between what The Open Library is doing and what CDDB did back in the 90’s. The Fez Guys have a great write up of what happened to CDDB/Escient/Gracenote, but to summarize… A large community generated database of music metadata got locked away by a corporate body. It didn’t happen because CDDB planned all along to dupe their community, it didn’t happen because anyone was ‘evil’. It happened because a commercial organization needed to make money and the community had no protection from that.

An alternative service did spring up, which is what you want to happen in that circumstance. FreeDB.org set up using the CDDB software and someone in the Gracenote extended staff leaked them a copy of the database. With the correct licensing in place - a data equivalent of the GPL - FreeDB could simply have requested a copy. The community would have been protected.

I don’t want what happened with CDDB to happen with The Open Library, and to stop it requires a clear license that protects the community from The Open Library as well as The Open Library from anyone else.

This is the area we developed Talis Community License to cover (and yes, the name is draft too, it will change). We’ve been using it to protect contributions to our platform data services for over a year. It protects contributors from us as it prevents us, or anyone else, from locking the community’s data away at a later date. It’s an Open License, anyone can use it to protect their users contributions in the same way.

Technorati Tags: Open Data, Open Library, Creative Commons, Talis Community License

Share This

Scanning Boing Boing this morning for its usual daily meanderings through the underbelly of wonderful stuff on the web I find an interesting snippet titled Giving away the public domain docs the US gov charges money for

The piece points to http://public.resource.org/ and Carl Malamud, the site’s creator, is quoted as saying

public.resource.org has created a mirror of NTIS.Gov’s [National Technical Information Services] store that sells public domain materials. Our twist is that instead of sending you the materials, we’ll release them back into the public domain for everybody to use. We mashed some of the materials up in a little infomercial here.

In the US the law states that stuff produced by the federal government goes into the public domain. They don’t get the privilege of Copyright or any other protection over the contents of reports, photographs, papers or databases.

This doesn’t stop the government charging for them though.

The radical step taken at public.resource.org is to use a one-off purchase by a member of the public to free the data back into the public domain.

Casey Bison talked about releasing the LC data under a similar pattern of thinking, but with so much FUD around who may or may not own what data it looks like that hasn’t been organised just yet.

It’s a shame Library of Congress isn’t on the list at public.resource.org, or I may just have stumped up for it myself.

Found via Boing Boing

Share This

When I first skimmed through Creative Commons a few months back my initial thought was ‘great, at last simple sensible licencing that seems to be getting lots of buy-in‘ and naturally assumed that it was as suitable for software as any other work. But as we all know skimming things, and assumptions can be dangerous. Nevertheless I was more than a little surprised when the penny dropped that Creative Commons is deemed appropriate licensing for practically any type of creative work except software.

Still life goes on, and even though I’d discounted it as a licensing approach for software, it is very relevant for information and data that can be accessed, distributed, and mixed by software and services that will constitute the Silkworm Platform.

Then OCLC’s Thom Hickey in his Blog Outgoing posted an entry on Open Source Software licenses to which Rikhei commented that Creative Commons might be worth a look in Thom’s search for appropriate licensing for OCLC Open Source software. Thom says in reference to the OSI approved Open Source license that OCLC drew up a couple of yers back “The closer I read it, the less I understand it, and most people that want to use our software come up with some questions, most of which are hard to answer”

This prompted me to take another look at Creative Commons, and beyond their bland answer to the Can I use a Creative Commons license for software? FAQ.

I see from a thread on their mailing lists that the Debian Projet have also looked at this and although the have problems with their compatibility with CC’s NonComercial licenses they appear to be fairly close to the CC Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike licenses.

Thom points out in his comments, that software is a bit different as you need to take in to account things like indemnification. That’s true but as the mixing of information becomes more widespread it will not be long before indemnification against the ramifications of the use of incorrect information will become an issue.

I still believe that it would not be that difficult to produce a software CC license option, and to quote Thom again It would be nice to have something like Creative Commons, so you could point to a ‘non-commercial with attribution license’ that everyone would understand. Thats the key, as most people don’t understand licensing.

Share This