Bryan's Blog 2005/03/24
Maybe I spoke too soon about Massachusetts
In January I was pleased to find that Massachusetts had effectively banned Microsoft XML (presumably Office 200X) documents from being archivable documents. I was pleased, not because of any particular issues with Microsoft (although I have them), but because it recognised the importance of being able to rely on interpretting archived material in the future when one might not have licenses1 to the software that wrote the material.
However, it seems things have changed. Groklaw is now reporting that MA has approved Microsoft XML format as complying to the following definition of an open format:
Open Formats, as we're thinking about them, and we're trying to be precise with the language, because people use different English words for different technical terms, in our definition, 'Open Formats' are specifications for data file formats that are based on an underlying open standard, developed by an open community and affirmed by a standards body; or, de facto format standards controlled by other entities that are fully documented and available for public use under perpetual, royalty-free, and nondiscriminatory terms."
As Groklaw states, this is a bizarre decision given Microsoft are patenting their XML format all over the place. (Whether these patent applications will survive seems rather unlikely, but it's the intent that counts ... they obviously intend the documents to be far from open.)
by Bryan Lawrence : 2005/03/24 : Categories msxml (permalink)
JISC Digital Rights Meeting
On Tuesday I attended a JISC Consultation Workshop on Rights in Digital Environments. While the emphasis of this meeting was on rights management issues in a learning environment, and on documents etc, there was some interesting discussion on data rights issues. Among a number of interesting discussions and presentations were two that I found especially interesting: one by Charles Oppenheim on IPR issues in general, and one by Podromos Tsiavos on Commons UK.
I especially liked the following :
A simple way of deciding about copyright and database rights, and whether relevant: Essentially: "Copyright is about creativity, and database rights are about investment of time and labour." A digital object might enjoy both, one, or neither.
Also: "Copyright is less to do with the law than it is to do with the management of risk". Oppenheim mentioned his formula for the financial risk of violating copyright, which should be compared with the effort and cost associated with getting copyright clearance. Essentially you need to multiply together the risks of various things happening against the possible financial implications of copyright violation (which may not be large, depending on what loss of income was involved the legal costs might be greater than the actual violation). The formula terms include something like:
chance of what you are doing actually offending copyright
chance of being noticed by the copyright holder
chance of the copyright holder actually objecting
chance of them actually taking you to court
value of potential liability
Additionally,
In the presentation on creative commons, I finally understood that actually the creative commons license isn't one license it's several (this is obvious actually, but only when you know :-).
There was general agreement that nearly no one actually reads licenses, and the Creative Commons icons were a very useful concept. Here, for my record are the icons.
The science commons project will explicitly look at the database rights issue, not just copyright for scientific activities.
The idea of using a (unique) identifier to link to a rights database was discussed, but the usual issues for globally unique identifiers intrude on actually doing it ...
There are lots of IPR issues associated with metadata
Who owns it as we add layers?
Relationship to the data ownership and accompanying rights?
Note that auto-generated metadata becomes a "computer-generated work"
etc
by Bryan Lawrence : 2005/03/24 : Categories curation (permalink)
GPL Tested in Case Law
Groklaw has an article on a case where the GPL has actually been tested in (a US) court, and won. This is important because some argue that the GPL hasn't been properly tested. Well it has now.
This case is also interesting in that it has regard to standards compliance and copyright. The bottom line with regard to the latter appears to be that when it becomes law to comply with a standard, the standard itself can no longer be protected by copyright.
by Bryan Lawrence : 2005/03/24 : Categories curation computing (permalink)