Comments on: It Appears ChemSpider Does BAD by Using Creative Commons Licenses

By: Egon Willighagen

Egon Willighagen — Mon, 12 May 2008 18:28:46 +0000

Chris, yes, anyone can use the data for screening etc. It gets more complicated, however, and only if, you start mixing ChemSpider data (or CC-SA-BY data) with data licensed differently. That’s something quite common to software, though, and people got used to that.

The SC suggests to solve those data aggregation problems, by waiving all rights, such as attribution and share-a-like. The upsides of that is that querying a database becomes much easier, because one does not have to worry about finding all the involved licenses, and issues about license incompatibilities when combining things into a query result.

So, as long as data users keep up with the share-a-like and attribution, one has every right to use, redistribute and change the data.

By: Chris Singleton

Chris Singleton — Mon, 12 May 2008 12:56:28 +0000

So will this affect data depositions at all, since a lot of us usually deposit as open data? I prefer that anything I deposit be available for anyone to use with few restrictions, will this still be the case?

And as a side note, my mother used to use the phrase Hell’s Bells. I’m from the southern U.S., so no idea where that came from in my case!

By: The Open Data licensing issue : business|bytes|genes|molecules

The Open Data licensing issue : business|bytes|genes|molecules — Sun, 11 May 2008 17:20:50 +0000

[...] Williams announcing CC support for data on ChemSpider. That was followed by a chain of events and a ton of confusion. Let me add my voice to this debate, since Open Data is near and dear to my [...]

By: will

will — Sun, 11 May 2008 11:31:32 +0000

I think this licence issue is a bit of a distraction wrt removing access barriers to science.

Many publishers have been providing free access to tens/hundreds of thousands of articles for years e.g. Natl Acad Sci USA.

Yet, this seems to go unnoticed because they concentrate on publishing and don’t want to weaken their copyright (an issue which, to me, has nothing to do with access anyway).

It may not be the case that weakened copyright strengthens open access because it may remove the motivation to publish the work in the first place.

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Sat, 10 May 2008 18:06:53 +0000

One thing I will say is that if every freelance writer/artist/whatever had to spend as much time mulling over contracts/licenses/waivers/indemnity clauses as the lawyers would like us to do, very few freelance efforts would ever see the light of day…

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Sat, 10 May 2008 15:20:33 +0000

I’m not chipping in on the actual discussion, you’re definitely stuck between a material high on Moh’s scale and a geological mineral deposit, it seems! But “Hell’s Bells”, I’d not heard that phrase since before I left home which is well over two decades past and it brought back a flood of memories. My dad worked in catering (and subsequentyl civil engineering) so had plenty of opportunities to exercise his right to explete

By: Rich Apodaca

Rich Apodaca — Sat, 10 May 2008 13:58:21 +0000

A lot of Open Source projects get sidetracked in license issues and never recover. But the license rarely matters in the end.

Good or bad only matter as applied to the quality of the service being created – Open Source has many examples. Linux is a great product with a crappy license.

A crappy product with a great license is still crappy. A great product with a crappy license is still great.

Ultimately, the license has little to do with why people really care about great products.

You’ll find few complaining about Google’s terms of use, despite the fact that they’re ‘just’ re-processing the hard work of others.

The only issue to keep in mind is that facts are not copyrightable and therefore not licensable. So discussions about the license applied to facts are totally pointless. Discussions about licensing the _expression_ of facts might be more productive.

And discussions about what separates a fact from a copyrightable piece of work in science might be even more useful still.

By: Unilever Centre for Molecular Informatics, Cambridge - petermr’s blog » Blog Archive » I am still DELIGHTED with Chemspider

Sat, 10 May 2008 07:53:18 +0000

[...] is a comment I posted on the ChemSpider blog, one of two I tried to post. I’m cross posting here to make sure it’s public. Make sure to [...]

By: Egon Willighagen

Egon Willighagen — Sat, 10 May 2008 07:15:13 +0000

Antony, I have written down my catch on this discussion in my blog: http://chem-bla-ics.blogspot.com/2008/05/does-chemspider-really-violate-open.html Bottom line: I applaud your intention, but am also happy with the choice of license. We picked the MIT license for the BODR license, which does not have the 'viral' aspect of the CC, but I am happy if someone releases something as GPL too. I do not see a fundamental reason why we should treat data different from other kinds of knowledge, viz. algorithms.