[OAI-general] Re: OAI and intellectual property issues

[Hussein Suleman]

hi

i agree to some degree with many people in this discussion ... the
reason why OAI needs to stay out of IP recommendations is that the
Initiative needs to adopt a non-partisan stance so as to promote
widespread adoption of the underlying principles behind the technology.

that said, not supporting a single baseline IP statement is one approach
to achieve this ... another would be to specify a range of possible IP
statements as baselines and i would like for us to investigate the
feasibility of doing this ...

would it be possible for us to specify a small set of standard
statements that are strong enough to serve as a superset statement list
?

for example, if an IP statement said "xyz" then it does not necessarily
preclude the possibility of some or all of the metadata having looser
restrictions ... any data provider that conforms to "xyz" may harvest
the the metadata ... but data providers that are willing to read the
individual statements and weigh the legalities are also welcome at their
own peril to implement "looser-than-xyz" policies ...

i also recommend a simple controlled vocabulary with correspondences to
rights statements that are listed as a supplemental tech document on the
OAI site ... something along the lines of:

"completely free" = "All metadata and associated data may be used
without restriction by any commercial or non-commercial entity for free
access or resale"
"metadata publicly free" = "All metadata may be used without restriction
by any commercial or non-commercial entity, but may not be further
propagated in a non-value-added form for profit"
...

now i know people are going to say this is too complex ... i dont think
it is ... with a little careful wording we can cover most cases with a
few statements ... and a controlled vocabulary will make it so much
easier for service providers to abide by the data providers' policies
...

ttfn
----hussein

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hussein suleman -- hussein@vt.edu -- vtcs -- http://purl.org/net/hussein
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