CLARIN WP7: Intellectual Property Rights and other Legal Matters Kimmo Koskenniemi 18 February 2008 University of Helsinki (UHEL) Department of General.

CLARIN WP7: Intellectual Property Rights and other Legal Matters

Kimmo Koskenniemi

18 February 2008

University of Helsinki (UHEL)

Department of General Linguistics

Faculty of Arts

WP7: Overall goals

WP7 deals with copyrights, patents, licensing,

authorization and authentication which are needed for the

proper use of language resources. Whereas WP5 works with the standards and taxonomies

of the language resources and tools, WP7 deals with the

copyrights and licenses of these. The authorization and authentication patterns of WP7 are

shared with WP2 where their technical implementation is

treated.

User

LRCollector 1

LRCollector k

Author/Publisher 1

Author/Publisher k

Author/Publisher n

ComputingCentre m

ComputingCentre 1

TrustedOrganization

Copyright and licenses (WG2A)

A copyright restricts the public showing and making

copies of a work (such as a text, spoken material, etc.) A copyright allows citations and making a few copies for

one's personal use (with some restrictions). A license is an agreement which modifies the restrictions

and permissions of using a work. Licenses of language materials allow a little beyond what

the copyright would permit anyway (i.e. making a copy or

showing the text for selected people) Licenses mostly restrict and narrow down the rights a

user would otherwise have (according to the copyright

legislation).

Questions about copyright (WG2A)

An author transfers all or a part of his/her copyrights to a

publisher (but does not necessarily know which). Some

rights can't be transferred and some can. Transferring all rights need not include all rights. Are individuals allowed to make personal electronic

copies of works? What is "personal use"? What is a derivative of a work and how far is the copyright

inherited? A full concordance? List of words with

frequencies? Common words in several corpora? White/black/grey areas where grey can turn into black or

grey at a trial in court.

Migration of licenses for materials (WG2A)

Migrate old licenses into new standard ones by finding a

standard license which grants less rights and imposes

more restrictions and use that. If the user believes that he/she has more restrictions and

less rights, no harm is done.

Automating the granting of access (WG2A)

Easy to grant access to whole groups if that can is

allowed. The granting of access to individuals should be based on

features which can be certified at the site where the user

works. If we trust that organization, the granting of access

con be automated. This puts special requirements on what facts and

commitments the prospective user must sign him/herself

and what the home organization must certify. (Avoid

criteria which would need individual checking.)

To do in WG 2A

Build a network of contacts, one in each country. Collect an inventory of existing licenses (and standard

licenses). Information leaflets prepared for publishers. Collect information on differences in national

interpretations of copyright legislation. Invite various parties involved to the WG: publishers,

organizations for authors, potential "trusted organizations" Find out what kind of information can be collected for the

applications and what will satisfy the copyright owners. Sketch a set of a few model licenses. Fair use of materials for research purposes also in

Europe (as in USA).

Retaining trust at distance (WG 4)

Study techniques for remote authentication and

authorization from the juridical and contractual point of

view. What could be done using electronic signatures and when

can they be used? Set up rules and model contracts which the computing

centres, users, material collectors, software providers,

authors and publishers should obey.

Trust and credibility (WG4)

The publisher/author must trust the collector (license). The collector must trust the trusted organizations and that

they correctly authenticate their staff or student users and

give correct and reliable information about them (a

contract). The collector must trust the centres where the materials

are deposited so that they only allow authorized users to

access the materials (agreement for depositing and

services).

To do in WG4

Collect a set of relevant contact persons. Collect existing agreements (between computing centres,

collectors etc.) Make an inventory of existing practices of authentication

and authorization in universities and other organizations.

(How much the organizations themselves trust their

electronic authentication.)

Language tools for CLARIN (WG2B)

CLARIN needs human language technologies for a wide

array of languages, cf. also WP5 and WP2. Normalizing, parsing and processing of the materials

should be multilingual (maybe some 100 languages). Programs may have licenses which restrict their use

together with other programs or materials.

Open source tool licenses (WG2B)

Tools under open source licenses would be useful for

CLARIN software as they guarantee the freedom of

maintaining and developing them as needed. The use of open source programs is free (they can be

applied to any data and be used even commercially). CLARIN will follow open source principles in its own

software where possible. Open source programs can usually, but not always, be

combined to create larger systems. WP7 studies existing open source software licenses and

produces recommendations for open source licenses to

be used for CLARIN software.

Proprietary tool licenses (WG2B)

Proprietary programs have individual licenses which differ

from each other. Some programs cannot be combined with other programs

because of (often unintended) contradicting clauses in

their licenses. Commercial software cannot be combined e.g. with free

software under GNU GPL license. Model contracts for commercial software to be included in

CLARIN services .

language councils,research centres

research projectsSMEs for speech

technology &dialogue applications

SMEs forinformation retrieval

universities

SMEs for authoringtool productstext

corpora

lexicaas DBs

speechcorpora

tree banksword nets

open src LR tools

ELDA and LDC (WG3)

Become acquainted with the operations and principles of

ELDA (agreements, rules and practices). WP7 will define the relation between ELRA/ELDA and

CLARIN, and the cooperation with them.

IPR legislation (WG2C)

Collect members with legal expertise from several

countries. Study European IPR legislation and practices Possibly produce recommendations for alterations in the

legislation.

Partners in WP7

UHEL: University of Helsinki (24 pm) ELDA: European Language Resources Distribution

Agency S.A. (2 pm) UTU: Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (2 pm) INL: Instituut voor Nederlandse Lexicologie (2 pm) ILSP: Institute for Language and Speech Processing -

Athena Research and Innovation Centre in Information,

Communication and Knowledge Technologies (2 pm)

Deliverables of WP7

D7S-2.1 A report including Model Licensing Templates

and Authorization and Authentication Scheme (20 pm,

month 36) D7S-3.1 Collaboration Plan between CLARIN and

external services (4 pm, month 24) D7S-4.1 Set of Federation Agreements for CLARIN

centres (8 pm, month 36)

Ethical rules (no group yet)

WP7 also considers the ethical rules and

recommendations related to the language resources. Recordings and other personal documents need special

attention as they contain sensitive data.

Commercial or free? (No group yet)

Traditionally, research use of LRs has been free of

charges but there are exceptions. Some services, e.g. the Russian Integrum offers almost

all published Russian newspapers and periodicals in a

commercial on line retrieval system which is also used by

researchers (but it costs). Integrum probably gets its data free but it gives a royalty

to the publishers according to the use of their data. In this

way, the coverage of Integrum is exceptionally good. WP7 will study the option of including commercial

resources in the CLARIN scheme.